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A dazzling, utterly distinctive saga from Russia's most celebrated-and most controversial-novelist
Vladimir Sorokin is one of Russia's most popular and provocative novelists. In his scabrous dystopian satire Day of the Oprichnik, American readers were introduced to his distinctive style, which combines an edgy avant-garde sensibility with a fondness for the absurd and even the grotesque-all in service of bringing out stinging truths about life in modern-day Russia.
In The Blizzard, we are immersed in the atmosphere of a nineteenth-century Russia. Garin, a district doctor, is desperately trying to reach the village of Dolgoye, where a mysterious epidemic is turning people into zombies. He carries with him a vaccine that will prevent the spread of this terrible disease but is stymied in his travels by an all-consuming snowstorm, an impenetrable blizzard that turns a drive that should last only a few hours into a voyage of days and, finally, a journey into eternity.
The Blizzard dramatizes a timeless metaphysical predicament. The characters in this nearly postapocalyptic world are constantly in motion and yet somehow trapped and frozen-spending day and night fighting their way through the storm on an expedition filled with extraordinary encounters, dangerous escapades, torturous imaginings, and amorous adventures. Hypnotic, fascinating, and richly descriptive, The Blizzard is a seminal work from one of the most inventive writers working today.
"[It] doesn't quite rise to the level of his previous books, despite its fast pace and air of frigid danger. Sorokin's mean streak is still intact, but The Blizzard is, paradoxically, the breeziest of satires." - Publishers Weekly
"A strange, distinctly Russian diversion for readers looking for something completely different." - Kirkus Reviews
This information about The Blizzard was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Vladimir Sorokin is the author of many plays, short stories, screenplays, and novels, including Day of the Oprichnik. He was short-listed for the Man Booker International Prize in 2013. He has won the Andrei Bely Prize and the Maxim Gorky Prize, and was nominated for the Booker–Open Russia Literary Prize. He lives in Moscow.
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