Knowing when to pick one’s battles is the mark of a great translator, and Gambrell is one. Her translation is as elegant, playful and layered as the original — and never appears labored.
This setup is intriguing and rich with possibility. But mostly, The Blizzard left me cold. The prose is uneven: at its best moments, it's clear and straightforward, but at its worst it is positively cringe-worthy.
Though a handful of dream sequences in these pages showcase Mr. Sorokin’s antic and sometimes grotesque imagination, the novel as a whole is a glum, predictable and cursory affair.
Much of The Blizzard will be recognizable from old novels: the pince-nez worn by Garin, icons and samovars, a warm berth above the stove, distances measured in versts. But this is Sorokin. Anachrony reigns. Relics of Russia’s past mix with a fantastical future, and both stand in for a cruel, uncertain present.
The colorful language, whether out-loud repartee or inner thoughts, together with several vibrant daydreams and psychedelic hallucinations, provide a neat contrast to the all-engulfing whiteness of the blizzard. That intensifying blizzard becomes a perfect metaphor, for the deeper we get into the novel, the more lost we are. But Sorokin’s storytelling is so mesmeric and so richly inventive that being snow-blinded is half the fun.
Sorokin is a veteran of the Soviet literary underground, and this surrealistic eruption of alien elements inside an established literary form is an old tactic of his: A gifted literary mimic, he often pits different types of language against each other inside his books.
