Pu Songling, Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio

 

The stories of Pu Songling (1640-1715) are some of the most gorgeous fantastic tales I’ve ever read. They’re full of surprise and grotesquerie and startlingly vivid textures. While they express the ideology of their time, they also manage to be subversive in many ways. The precision of their style is a great vehicle for the somehow culturally logical absurdities of the narratives. Unforgettable. I could read these stories over and over.

The Blizzard by Vladamir Sorokin

 

In the novel The Blizzard (2010, English translation 2015) by Vladamir Sorokin, events take place in dangerous and potentially deadly cold and snow and ice. The book features a lot of human brutality, exploitation and indifference to other humans and displays the essential grimness and frequent desperation of human behavior. It has satiric, comic elements that are sometimes nearly slapstick and often involve equipment not working in the dangerous weather. The question is whether the journey is going anywhere or will end up being a hopeless loop of absurdity that may lead to death. There is probably a message about the hopelessness of living in a totalitarian society with a cold climate for which alternatives seem mostly fantasy.

I’ve long been a fan of Russian literature, and while I liked this book I didn’t love it because the features above are so much like so much other recent Russian fiction that I find in English translation. It left me wondering what might be some recent Russian novels that are not about coldness, brutality, indifference, and political hopelessness. But I suppose Russian fiction about warm weather is probably hard to come by.