Blue Lard opens with an epistolary section that reads like Alexander de Large living the plot of one of the less coherent PKD novels. Boris, our first protagonist, is a “biophilologist” working on Business Trip BL-3, deep in Siberia. The purpose of the business trip? To encourage faulty clones of great Russian authors to engage in the “script process,” which produces as a byproduct the titular “blue lard.” The “blue lard” is some sort of anti-entropic substance useful as a superconductor for a reactor on the moon or something but who cares. That’s not even important.

Boris writes in a fucked-up “neorussian” tinged with Chinese phrases and confusing vernacular. There’s a glossary but it’s mostly a joke. The scripts written by the clones would simply be destroyed, but Boris preserves them, sending them to his “little bastard” of a lover via genetically modified super pigeons. The scripts themselves are parodies, usually with plots that are almost regular with certain uncanny elements or bizarre writing quirks inserted. This probably works better in the original Russian— here Max Lawton seems to parody the Garner translation for Dostoevsky, and then I can’t catch the rest of the intended targets. Some of the stories are funny, some are disturbing nightmares (my favorite was the Platonov and the Dostoevsky).

And then just like that the blue lard changes hands to the Earth Fuckers, a religious cult who speak regular Russian, thankfully. There’s a Brazil-esque comedy where the blue lard changes hands up the chain of Earth Fuckers, each recipient delving deeper to meet his superiors and then getting chastised and maybe killed, and so it goes. Finally it lands in the hands of a “babe” with an enormous cock that drags along the floor who’s dropped into a Zoroastrian Time Machine back to 1951.

But a different 1951, and the blue lard changes hands again— now in the ownership of a libertinized Stalin, and you are subjected to descriptions of gold and jewels, sumptuous clothing, cannibalism, gay sex, rape, tense dinners, the whole 120 days of Sodom + Bret Easton Ellis thing. This part I didn’t really enjoy as much as the other two.

Every review mentions the famous incident of Russian nationalist kids throwing copies of the book into a giant paper mache toilet on account of a particularly nasty age-regression gay sex scene between Stalin and a hunchbacked Kruschev. Maybe there’s a deeper meaning, maybe it was just meant to be funny. Certainly the weakest part of the book for me, besides the excruciating “extroduction” where translator Lawton sucks himself off furiosamente. Yes, it’s very cool that you hang out with Sorokin and took him to the chillest restaurants to hang out with the hottest guys. It’s so noble that you put the translators introduction at the end! Maybe you should have just left it out entirely?

Fun read, occasionally veers into what I think is empty provocation, but since I’m reading it in translation and I don’t have much cultural context, it’s hard to say. Worth it if you like Pynchon or BEE. Certainly worth reading up to the end of the epistolary section for the funny/weird/disturbing Russian lit parodies.

Blue Lard

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