Victor Sonkin on Vladimir Sorokin's new novel, The Sugar Kremlin:
[T]he scenes of inexplicable and brutal cruelty, executions, horrible accidents and other disasters make the new book even more gruesome than the previous one. One of the traditional topics of anti-utopian literature, the death of culture, is barely touched upon. Culture seems to have died of its own accord, and in this new Russia, both the elite and the general public are quite content with the widely available cocaine and the New Year's treat which gives the book its title: a sugar Kremlin effigy.
Sometimes you (I mean one) despair(s) at the rightward drift of Russia, and so it's good to be reminded that comments such as the final sentence of that review appear not in some overlooked samizdat pamphlet, but in mainstream media like the Moscow Times.
Posted by: looby | August 31, 2008 at 06:06 PM