Ice (New York Review Books) [Hardcover]

Vladimir Sorokin (Author), Jamey Gambrell (Translator)

Book Description

Series: New York Review Books | Publication Date: January 23, 2007

Ice is at the center of Vladimir Sorokin's epic Ice Trilogy, which is also published by NYRB Classics.

Moscow has been hit by a wave of brutal murders. The victims are of both sexes, from different backgrounds, and of all ages, but invariably blond and blue-eyed. They are found with their breastbones smashed in, their hearts crushed. There is no sign of any motive.

 

Drugs, sex, and violence are the currency of daily life in Moscow. Criminal gangs and unscrupulous financial operators run the show. But in the midst of so much squalor one mysterious group is pursuing a long-meditated plan. Blond and blue-eyed, with a strange shared attraction to a chunk of interstellar ice, they are looking for their brothers and sisters, precisely 23,000 of them. Lost among the common herd of humanity, they must be awakened and set free. How? With a crude hammer fashioned out of the cosmic ice. Humans, meat machines, die under its blows. The hearts of the chosen answer by uttering their true names. For the first time they know the ecstasy of true life.

For the awakened, the future, like the past, is simple. It is ice.

What is Ice? A gritty dispatch from the front lines of the contemporary world, a gnostic fairy tale, a hard-boiled parable, a New Age parody, a bitingly funny fantasy in the great Russian tradition that begins with Gogol and continues with Nabokov, a renegade fiction to set beside those of Philip K. Dick and Michel Houellebecq, and the most ambitious and accomplished novel yet by Vladimir Sorokin, the stylistic virtuoso and master of provocation who, in the words of The Moscow Times, is “the only living Russian author who can be called a classic.”

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Blond, blue-eyed contemporary Muscovites are being kidnapped, driven to remote areas and bashed in the chest with hammers that have iceblock heads; the victims are being "cracked" by their assailants, who want to free their hearts to "speak"—literally. The "empties" (those whose hearts are silent) are left to die; the others (whose hearts spontaneously utter a word or two in the 23-word "heart language") are recognized by their assailants as fellow "heart speakers." Over the course of this bizarrely beautiful novel, three "heart-speakers" —Lapin, Nikolaeva and Borenboim—are instructed by Khram, the mentor of Russia's heart speakers, in the tenets of their new life, in which they love one another and hammer humans to achieve the apocalypse. Khram herself was "hammered" by a German S.S. officer in a WWII slave labor camp, and in a long flashback, she returns to Stalin's Russia to secure the Siberian ice needed for hammering and to exploit the gulag for heart speakers through mass murder. In stripped down, poker-faced prose, Sorokin registers a world in which the inhumanity of man to man is exploited by a murderous emerging race who are, by contrast, in sweet mutual harmony with one another. This is a Master and Margarita for the age of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (Jan.)
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From Booklist

This is the first novel by Sorokin--supposedly considered a major Russian author--translated into English and is considered his finest work to date; unfortunately, it seems to have lost something in translation. A cult of blond-haired, blue-eyed murderers are going around Moscow kidnapping people, tying them up, and then beating them on the chest with hammers made out of ice (kept in portable refrigerators) from a Siberian meteorite. The purpose of this injurious behavior is to awaken the celestial beings who are residing within them; however, only a tiny percentage of the victims survive this painful "rebirth." The survivors are given new names, a healthy bank account, and are sent out to "awaken" more of their kind. A clipped, curt writing style; numerous scenes of torture and suffering; tedious characters; and a bizarre plot make this a decidedly difficult read. Recommended only for the most die-hard literary/adventure-fiction reader, but expect some demand. Michael Gannon
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: NYRB Classics (January 23, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590171950
• ISBN-13: 978-1590171950
• Product Dimensions: 5.9 x 1 x 8.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,125,762 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "Out of whose womb came the ice? ___, February 16, 2007

By 

Leonard Fleisig "Len" (Washington, D.C.) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Ice (New York Review Books) (Hardcover)

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.

Highly recommended despite, or perhaps because of, the discomfort engendered by reading it. L. Fleisig

10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The best contemporary Russian writer, April 19, 2006

By 

S. Rosenaur (Portland, Oregon, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Ice (New York Review Books) (Hardcover)

This one has no ritualistic hyperviolence, anal sex among Communist party leaders, chapters of nearly impenetrable dialogue in "New Chinese". Ice ("Liod") is the slickest, least formally challenging and graphically brutal book so far, that is nevertheless quite mysanthropic at its core. Sorokin is actually using a "Star Wars"-type of a marketing tool: initially releasing part 2 of a trilogy (the prequel, "Put' Bro" was released in Russia a year later, and last year saw the release of the entire trilogy, concluded by the part 3, "23000")

I have not read any of Sorokin's books in english translation, so cannot vouch that it does justice to the originals. He is a very powerful contemporary Russian writer and definitely deserves attention of those who enjoy the works of Pelevin and WM Burroughs.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very much in the middle of the contemporary Russian trends, March 23, 2007

By 

Aleksandra Nita-Lazar (MD, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Ice (New York Review Books) (Hardcover)

Sorokin's "Ice" is a good representative of a modern trend in Russian literature and film.
The novel starts with the scene in Moscow, where several, so it appears, thugs, performing a sadistic experiment: they maniacally hit a blond and blue-eyed man on the chest with a hammer made of a block of ice.
As it turns out, the purpose is to find another member of a secret community, who can be recognized because he would cry out the name of his heart, his true name, after being hit with ice. And not just the ordinary ice, but only the ice from the remains of the Tunguska meteorite, the ideal cosmic substance... There are exactly twenty-three thousand of brothers and sisters, dispersed around the globe and when all would be found, they will rule the world and get it to the end.

The book is interesting and dynamically written, although the plot gets a little predictable after a while. There are chosen people in hiding, forming a secret society opposing the present reality, there are hints of a new dictatorship, a Russian curse, there is brutality and money-oriented attitude of the ordinary people who want to survive in the changed world around them. The mix of science-fiction and contemporary Russian reality is a common theme exploited by many authors. I think Pielewin in "Generation"P"" did it better, because he managed to shed some light on a real problem, Russia dealing with capitalism and consumer society. The classic of this genre is, of course, the movie "Nightwatch" ("Nocznyj dozor"), a must-see for everyone.

Having said that, I would like to add that Sorokin writes skillfully and the novel reads well. The descriptions of the mystic experiences of "heart to heart" love between brothers and sisters are quite remarkable. "Ice" is a good book, it is just not a new subject (except for being a satire on a modern sectarian language) and there were others who did it better.