Ice Hardcover - 2007

Media reviews

"Considered [Sorokin's] fineset work to date." --Booklist

"The controversial postmodernist Vladimir Sorokin has struck through the language barrier again in a crystalline English translation by Jamey Gambrell of his unnerving novel...Ice, one of 11 novels he has written, and the first installment in a projected trilogy to be published by New York Review Books, is a marvelous introduction to his work." —The St. Petersburg Times [Russia]

"George A. Romero meets Nikolai Gogol." —Entertainment Weekly

"[Ice] provides a head-scratching pleasure and deceptive quickness similar to that found in the novels of Haruki Murakami...[It] is a thriller in the truest sense: In addition to a swift and sure plot, reading it affords the thrill of discovering something new." —Los Angeles Times

A “trippy satire from one of Russia's most talented writers”—Bloomberg News

“After reading Russian author Vladimir Sorokin’s recently translated Ice (out now), we realized that we’d encountered one of those rare books that rearrange your brain. Sorokin – who was once threatened with jail for writing a sex scene between Khrushchev and Stalin – has written a story about an asteroid buried in Siberia that communicates with its alien but humanoid “children.” Convinced of their superiority, the aliens regard humans as “meat machines” and dispatch them remorselessly. Yet Sorokin makes us feel a disturbing sympathy for the murderous aliens. In the process, he explores the dark secret of lockstep, exclusivist zealotry: Once you’ve joined the in-crowd, you zealotry: Once you’ve joined the in-crowd, you really do feel like a member of a superior species.
Those who aren’t with you are worse than inferior – they’re disposable. Of course, you could ignore the ah-ha insight and read Ice for its surprising plot twists and insider’s view of secret cults – that is, the kind of thriller elements that are irresistible to U.S. meat machines.” –Very Short List

“ICE is the rare novel that tiptoes between the fictional world and the reader’s, as answers arising from the gloom succumb to yet another unforeseen question. In ICE, no one is safe from Sorokin’s brilliantly chilling pen–no character, and certainly no reader.” —Paste Magazine

"A truly thrilling postmodern thriller...Ice succeeds brilliantly as both a thriller and a cautionary tale about totalitarianism, bigotry, elitism, and fundamentalism. Highly recommended for both public and academic libraries and as a much-needed antidote to the Left Behind books.” —Library Journal

"Russian postmodernist Sorokin's English-language debut combines imaginative audacity and stylistic virtuosity in a work that defies categorization. The first section has the staccato pacing of hard-boiled pulp fiction, and it's about as subtle as the hammer to the human chest that opens the breathlessly paced narrative...The second section offers a backstory narrated in a very different voice...The novel culminates in two much shorter sections that flash forward to a future when the ice has become a self-administered instrument of both spiritual salvation and entertainment, the next step beyond the digital revolution...A page-turner with provocative implications." --Kirkus

"Blond, blue-eyed contemporary Muscovites are being kidnapped, driven to remote areas and bashed in the chest with hammers that have ice-block 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’–a 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.” —Publishers Weekly

“Sorokin’s works…are, or should be, landmarks of international postmodern fiction.”–The New York Review of Books

“…notorious…He writes stories in the style of 19th century realism or mid-20th century socialist realism–witty, gemlike renditions of these styles…”–The Boston Globe

“What makes Sorokin’s text more than just a successful thriller is its sophisticated and skillful deconstruction of a Utopian project of human transformation…This is an important novel which should be translated into English so that readers unfamiliar with the Russian language can appreciate Sorokin’s skillful intrigue, plot structure, and challenging discourse.”–World Literature Today

“[Sorokin]…rip[s] off the page and blast[s] the eyeballs…”–The Guardian

“Sorokin is a writer who is not only demolishing literary and cultural taboos in his works, but also challenging the notion of literature itself, and the role of the reader in the literary process. In all his major works he seems to be asking the reader: dare you read on?”–The Literary Encyclopedia

“Vladimir Sorokin…is in his mid-forties, and has a broad face, soft eyes, and a chin that ends in a soul patch. He is not a small man, and, dressed in a T-shirt and beach shorts, he lumbers around like the kind of peaceful, intelligent animal that could grace Canadian currency. He admires the English writer J.G. Ballard. And has the habit of phrasing his statements in the form of a question by adding an interrogative ‘yes’ at the end. ‘Literature is a text, yes?’…Yet Sorokin was cautiously optimistic about the future. ‘There has been a literary renaissance in the past few years,’ he told me, and then proposed his theory of Russian Literature, which I warn you, involves a bear metaphor: ‘The Russian bear is big and mostly asleep. He awakes only during revolution, wars, perestroika, and so on, then he goes back to sleep. When he wakes up, he doesn’t need literature, and there have been no good novels written in these times. But when this bear goes to sleep he sees dreams–and that is Russian literature.’”–Gary Shteyngart, The New Yorker