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April 15, 2007
They Had a Hammer
By KEN KALFUS

ICE  By Vladimir Sorokin. Translated by Jamey Gambrell.

321 pp. New York Review Books. $23.95.

Controversy chases the Russian writer Vladimir Sorokin the way a dog chases
a stick. His 1999 novel, "Blue Lard," featuring some hot man-on-man love
between Stalin and Khrushchev, provoked pornography charges and a public
protest in Moscow, where copies of the book were dumped in a large mock
toilet. His libretto for a Bolshoi Opera production earned the threat of an
inquiry in the Duma in 2005. Despite the international publicity generated
by all this, little of Sorokin's work has reached American audiences.

The intellectual journal n+1 tried to increase awareness of Sorokin in 2004
with a characteristically indelicate excerpt from his novel "The Norm," a
Brezhnev-era fantasy in which every Soviet citizen is required to consume
daily the brown, malodorous contents of mass-produced cellophane packets.
After a few pages in which a series of ordinary individuals reluctantly
ingest their rations, we come to understand that what they're eating is
human excrement, an exquisite token of life's regimentation within and
beyond Russian borders.

Sorokin's new offering to English-language readers, "Ice," is the first of a
trilogy that has already been published in Russia. It also revolves around a
symbolic essential substance: in this case, a crystalline icelike material,
mined from a meteor, that can awaken the power of speech in selected human
hearts. Unfortunately, this central conceit proves even harder to swallow
than the one in "The Norm."

"Ice" opens like a crime thriller, with three familiar contemporary Russian
characters: the student-slacker, the prostitute and the businessman. Each is
kidnapped in a separate incident, bound and gagged by teams of blue-eyed,
blond men and women who scour Moscow's streets for the similarly blue-eyed
and blond. The kidnappers strike their victims' chests with hammers until
they're killed or their hearts start to mumble and speak. When these hearts
reveal their identities (with guttural Klingonish names like Ural, Diar and
Mokho), the abducted are brought to a secret Moscow clinic where they're
treated for their chest injuries, welcomed as brothers and sisters and
invited to participate in some literally heart-to-heart chats with their
hosts. The hammers' heads are made from the meteor's magic ice.

These goings-on, brutal and strange even by Moscow standards, are explained
by Khram, an elderly woman whose heart was "awakened" when she was a young
girl sent to Germany. There she was selected for an ice thumping by members
of a secret organization who taught her the truth about Creation: "In the
beginning there was only the Light. And the Light shone in the Absolute
Emptiness. The Light Shone for Itself Alone. The Light consisted of 23,000
light-bearing rays. And we were those rays." Then the Light fell to Earth,
bringing imperfection into the universe. But the 23,000 rays still radiate
in the hearts of certain men and women, many of them unaware, every one of
them icily blond and blue-eyed. Once they've been found and their hearts
awakened, the 23,000 will chant the 23 "heart words" in unison, the Earth
will dissolve and the Light will return to Eternity.

That day will be a lousy one for the rest of us, but the founder of the cult
explains: "The absolute majority of people on this earth are walking dead.
They are born dead, they marry the dead, they give birth to the dead and
die; their dead children give birth to new dead - and so on, from century to
century." Unlike other conquering faiths, such as Christianity and
Communism, the ice-centered ideology refuses redemption to humanity at
large. The cult is looking only for its own, not for converts or slaves.
After finding Ural, Diar and Mokho, the ice people indifferently leave
behind the bodies of the "empties."

The cosmology behind this novel is absurd, of course, but "Ice" lacks some
of the elements that we associate with absurdist writing: humor, non
sequiturs, a correlation with reality that reveals the real world's
ludicrous particulars. The glib thing would be to declare "Ice" a spoof of
Russia's recent totalitarian past, or of totalitarianism or ideology or
religion in general, but Sorokin's ice cult hardly resonates with anything
historical. "Ice" is much less a satire than a single monstrous vision:
human beings are no more than "meat machines," a race unable to communicate
on a truly intimate scale and unworthy of continued existence. Purity lies
in a universe without thought or language. In his frigid antihumanism,
Sorokin parts company with Russian satirists like Gogol, Bulgakov, Yuri
Olesha and, more recently, Viktor Pelevin.

Jamey Gambrell, who has produced luminous translations of lyrical
contemporary Russian writers like Tatyana Tolstaya, transforms Sorokin's
staccato cadences into a hard-boiled English that suits the novel's
brutality, especially in its violent early chapters. But even with help from
a sensitive translator, American readers taking a whack at the novel with
their own ice hammers may have trouble finding its heart, and even more
trouble getting it to speak.

Ken Kalfus's most recent novel is "A Disorder Peculiar to the Country."