Sorokin is such a curious writer. His novels feel like fantastical B-movies. Full of melodrama and cheap horror. Yet at the same time they feel as though they’re hitting the contemporary Russian nerve. The Blizzard describes a doomed journey by a doctor to deliver a vaccine to a remote town in the depths of Mother Russia. A journey he seems destined to never complete as the conditions conspire to thwart him. Gradually the world the story occupies becomes stranger and stranger. Giants, nano technology, dwarf horses. Meanwhile, deep Russia remains unchanged, a world of vodka and stoves, tiny communities which are islands of warmth in a world of snow. This mish-mash, hotchpotch, is weirdly compelling and ends up feeling entirely allegorical, a telling portrait of a country which seems to concurrently exist in both the past and the future, with the present being of only minor importance.
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