Latest Review: "Ice Trilogy" by Vladimir Sorokin

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is an insane piece that I wrote about Vladimir Sorokin’s Ice Trilogy, which is translated from the Russian by Jamey Gambrell and available from New York Review Books.

I am aware of how crazily self-indulgent and odd this review is, but after writing about Sorokin so many times in such a short period (see this PEN roundup, and this review, and this podcast), I think my mind broke, and instead of writing a review, I ended up describing my vision of a miniseries version of the Ice Trilogy:

Back a few years ago, New York Review Books released Ice, one of the first books by Russian literati bad boy Vladimir Sorokin to make its way into America. After all the hype surrounding Sorokin—for being the star of post-Glasnost Russian literature, for being well hated by the Putin Youth, for writing fairly offensive books involving people “eating packets of shit” and “fucking the earth”—this novel was a bit disappointing. Not that it was bad, just underwhelming.

In a way, it’s unfortunate that Ice ever came out as a standalone volume. Put in context between the novels Bro and 23,000 it feels much more expansive and spooky, making the whole project significantly more fascinating.

That said, this trilogy would work much better as a TV miniseries . . . It’s one of those books that I wish I could edit wholesale. I’d love to cut this book apart, partially restructure it, trim away some of the redundancies, speed up the overall pacing, and really play up the Lost-style creepiness.

So, rather than analyze the book as is, I’m going to spoil the whole thing right here and now by recounting the six-part miniseries version that exists in my mind:

Episode One: Open in Siberia 1908 with a woman in Russia giving birth to a baby boy who is born at almost the exact moment of the Tunguska event. Huge explosion in the sky, crazy colors. Should be disorienting and ominous. Camera leaves the intimacy of the house where Alexander was born to pan upwards to show a huge region of Siberia that’s been totally flattened by this mysterious event. By a huge ice meteor that’s now mostly buried in the permafrost.

In present times, Olga travels to Israel to meet Bjorn, a man that she met through a online message board for people who have suffered and survived the “Ice Hammer.” When they meet, they show each other these strange scars on their breastbones. Every time Olga touches her chest, we get a flashback to a time when she was tricked and drugged and bashed in the chest with an “ice hammer” (a stick with a chunk of ice at the end of it) by some strange blond haired and blue eyed people who keep urging her to “speak with her heart.” She was left for dead, and is now determined to figure out who the fuck these people are.

These flashbacks correspond with the story they hear from the old man they go to meet—a dying Jew who, during WWII, was part of a group of kids pulled from a camp and taken to the woods where several are smashed in the chests with ice hammers. He describes two ancient, almost otherworldly people who seemed to be in charge, and watched the smashing in silence, with serenely creepy looks on their faces. Episode ends with the camera focusing in on their faces.

Click here to read the entire thing.