sunn_bleach's Reviews (249)

Everything that Camus’s “The Stranger” tried to be and surpassing it in every way through metaphor, history, and metatext. This is a story of alienation in the classical sense of the word; being so struck from your self and not only forming a mask but writing as if the mask didn’t exist while still alluding to it at every great step. Mishima’s own history just makes it that much more impactful.

 This book was so controversial in Russia upon release that Putinist supporters erected a paper-mache toilet in front of the Bolshoi Theatre, tossed copies of this book into it, then burned the toilet. Fuckin metal. Turns out, Putin supporters don't really like when a book has a sex scene between Stalin and Khrushchev - especially when the latter is the penetrative partner. (And it was absolutely hilarious.) 

Blue Lard takes place in the 2060s in which Russian literary figures are cloned and forced to write passages in the vein of the originals. A blue substance forms on their bodies as they do so, which is used for unknown purposes. The lard is stolen by Russian ultra-nationalists called the "Earth-Fuckers", who love Mother Russia so much that they literally have sex with soil taken from all around the country. The lard is sent back in time to 1950s Russia for reasons that only Stalin is purported to know about, culminating in an absolute bizarre finish with an alternate-history Earth in which Hitler shoots lightning from his palms. 

It's a weird book. And for the most part, it's the good kind of weird. It is intensely sardonic toward Russian national myths, and lots of this book had me taking sharp involuntarily breaths as something particularly ridiculous occurred (like Khrushchev literally eating the proletariat) or something a little more subtle and sinister (such as the focus on Stalin's dress and manner of eating during his first scene, showing how detached he was from the people). The highlight of the book is the first fourth, in which you read passages from the imperfect clones that utterly butcher Russian literary titans, from the Nabokov clone overusing obscure words with no paragraph breaks to the Dostoevsky clone making everyone cry at random spots. 

It become the bad kind of weird during parts that seem to be a 1999 Russian equivalent of 2006 "lol XD" humor. I can't tell you why Hitler is shooting lightning from his palms, unless it's a reference to the lightning bolt SS (and even then, there are better jokes). There's a protracted scene where a proletariat woman is almost run over by Stalin and gives birth to a black egg in an orphanage, which is then eaten and explodes in a young boy's stomach. Why? I dunno. There's a chance it's Russian historical/literature references that are simply over my head, but they're not the only examples of jokes that simply felt silly as opposed to ironic, and Sorokin excels in the latter. 

This has been a year for some of the best books I've ever read and some of the worst books I've ever read. This firmly falls in the latter category. I'd been interested in this book since reading some of Link's short stories and generally enjoying them (to say nothing of her Pulitzer Prize finalist status), and magical realism small-town stories are more or less half of what I read anyway. 

The book takes place in the small town of Lovesend, Massachusetts within the USA. Three teenagers are brought back to life by their music teacher, and they're given three days and three tasks to prove which of the two will stay alive and which of the two will die. Oh, and copious amounts of teen drama, because why not? 

I very strongly do not recommend this book and find it kind of impressive in how much it made me mad after the fact. I wouldn't say I'm glad I read it, but I am appreciative of how for that full 628 pages I was thinking about why it didn't work for me and making sure I pulled out concrete examples to remember. And I'm going to be highly skeptical of any other book from Link, which is a disappointing thing to say.

My problem with this book is less its content (the discussion on "classes" is fantastic) than the fact that Russell falls into the same hole as so many other philosopher-mathematicians: he doesn't actually know how to write. This is not as regards the symbolic aspect or definition of terms; it's that his prose is so overly loaded in "therefore we must as to proceed"-style of verbosity that it obscures half the points he tries to make. Part of this is the evolution of pedagogy over the last century of mathematics, part of it is that Russell's introduction simultaneously assumes unfamiliarity and familiarity with the concepts that he constantly oversteps into greater rigor. (Ironically, the last chapter anticipates and discusses this.)

It's an interesting primer, but one that's pretty much been overshadowed in concept (that all maths can come from philosophical axioms) by Godel's work decades later... in addition to their simply being much, much better-written works out there on maths and philosophy. Tobias Dantzig's "Number" is recommended for actual laypersons.