Ice (New York Review Books)

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Vladimir Sorokin

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Pages: 304 (Hardcover)

ISBN: 1590171950

Pub: The New York Review of Books, Inc

Pub date: 2008-02-29

Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 124188

Reader Reviews:

Coldly ambiguous (0/0 people found this helpful)

ICE is the second book by Sorokin to be translated into English, after his early work 'The Queue', a short novel about a soviet bread queue in which we have dozens of voices and drifting conversations but no interlocutors, which was given a tiny print run. Propelled to fame by his brush with the law over his portrayal of Stalin and Krushchev engaging in anal sex, ICE is Sorokin's first major translation. Sorokin's biggest preoccupation is the violence of mankind, and how this transmits through all aspects of culture. ICE is the story of a cult who batter ice hammers against victim's chests until the heart either begins to tell its real name - or the victim dies. But Sorokin is not an ordinary story teller; he is a purveyor of the absurd or grotesque. This cult and its role in Russian culture is presented throughout the book as a series of stories and vignettes, not in the form of a traditional plot, and the reader absorbs the idea as Sorokin explores it. Visionary and unsettling, it is a great read. Sorokin is reminiscent of his contemporary Pelevin, but more unsettling, more extreme, more violent. I look forward to translations of his most grotesque works such as 'Four Heroes'. Well worth a read.

"Out of whose womb came the ice? (3/3 people found this helpful)

And the hoary frost of heaven, who hath gendered it?"

These questions from the Book of Job serve as an appropriate theme for introducing Russian novelist Vladimir Sorokin's novel "Ice". Sorokin's work is well-known in Russia and much of Europe. One of his earlier books, Blue Lard, was the subject of a lawsuit brought by a Russian nationalist group claiming that his depiction of `intimate relations' between a clone of Stalin and a clone of Khrushchev was pornographic and defamed the Russian people. Not unexpectedly the suit resulted in a tremendous increase in sales.

To my knowledge, Ice, is the first book of Sorokin that has been translated into English. The first volume of a planned trilogy, Ice is born in violence. A group of blonde-haired, blue-eyed thugs (or so they seem) roaming the streets of Moscow find and kidnap blonde-haired, blue-eyed strangers, tie them up and hammer them mercilessly with a hammer made out of ice. The attackers listen to their victims. They are asked to speak "with their hearts". Most of their victims simply die from the beatings. But every now and again they find someone who manages to gurgle out a word from their heart. They are released and processed into a small, very secret brotherhood of other heart-seekers.

Part I of Ice introduces the reader to the `heart people" and the rather violent method of finding and recruiting new members. Part II provides the back story. In 1908 a large meteor crashed into the tundra of a remote part of Siberia. (Curiously this event also plays a role in Thomas Pynchon's new book "Against the Day"). The meteor consists of a huge piece of intergalactic ice, the "hoary frost of heaven" perhaps. The group uses the ice to break the ice that covers the hearts of humanity and has turned humanity into a collection of empty shells. Interestingly, the secret group's members in the 1930s and 1940s include high ranking members of the USSR's KGB (or NKVD) and Hitler's Gestapo. It is no surprise that Aryan features are a prerequisite for membership in the brotherhood. Part III is a rather bizarre look at a world in which "Ice" kits are sold that allow individual to perform their own self-awakening. Part III consists of testimonials of people who have used the kit.

I raced through "Ice" in one sitting but remain ambivalent about how I feel about it. I could not put the book down once I started it, but at the same time the book was more than a bit discomforting. Ultimately, Vladimir Sorokin's "Ice" is not a novel designed to warm the hearts of the reader. I've seen some reviews that compare him to Gogol and others to French-author Michel Houellebecq. I think, of the two, that the comparison to Houellebecq is the more apt. They each do an excellent job of painting a grim picture of individuals and societies as an example of both moral and physical decay. I finished "ICE" thinking that the story really had not even started, that there was a lot more for Sorokin to say. The Books of Psalms asks: "He casteth forth his ice like morsels. Who can stand before his cold?" Psalms. It will be interesting to see where Sorokin takes his ice and his cold in the next two volumes.

L. Fleisig

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