The Queue

(Paperback, Main)

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Over the last twenty-five years Vladimir Sorokin has established himself as a provocative and unignorable presence in contemporary Russian literature, and The Queue, his first novel, is now recognized as a modern classic. Sorokin's brilliance-his formal daring, his keen eye and ear for the absurdities of life and language, his unequaled playfulness-is manifest in this sly comedy set during the late Soviet "years of stagnation." Thousands of citizens are in line for ...nobody knows quite what, but the rumors are flying. Leather or suede Jackets, jeans Turkish, Swedish, maybe even American It doesn't matter-if something's for sale, it's time to queue up. The endless line of expectant, irritable, inquisitive, bored but never less than determined people has a life and a will of its own, and Sorokin, in a tour de force, conveys that life entirely through the ebb and flow of conversation. We get to know his characters as they joke and curse, flirt, fight over position in line, make love or break up, slurp down ice cream and vodka, run errands, fill out crossword puzzles, fall asleep and stand to attention again when morning comes around and the queue-which may be as long as life and as wide as the world-exercises its hypnotic hold. Sally Laird's translation of The Queue has been revised to reflect the changes in the latest Russian edition of Sorokin's youthful masterpiece, while in a new afterword Sorokin himself looks back with peculiar nostalgia on the bygone world of the Soviet Union.

Reviews

[A] landmark of international postmodern fiction.
Keith Gessen

"If queues were arranged in order of merit, it would only be fair to put the young Soviet writer Vladimir Sorokin at the head." -Guardian

"With humor, anger and irony, Sorokin creates a brilliant set piece, conveying the absurdity, the dehumanization and, above all, the inevitability of waiting in line." Publishers Weekly

"The Queue dispenses entirely with authorial interpolation; indeed, it dispenses with everything except dialogue, mostly curt one-liners, as though transcribed direct from a radio play. The uncredited voices are queueing outside a clothes shop in summer: Party panjandrums barge in front of the accompaniment of quickly muffled protests; vodka circulates; the Moscow sun dexlines; romance germinates. Anti-Soviet elements will perhaps coo over Valdimir Sorokin's happy mining of elemental koptimism from an unlikely seam; more pertinent to our purposes this book, alone of the quartet, displays genuine zest." -The Times (London)

"This novel reduces to delightful absurdity the rough democracy of the long lines that Soviet people-in-the-street endure in order to buy "luxury" goods. Sorokin is an innovative young writer, never published officially in the USSR, who draws on two great Russian traditions sorely missing from Soviet literature: avant-garde experiment and a flair for nonsense. The book has no description, settings, or stage directionnothing but voices: snatches of conversation, rumors, jokes, howls of rage, roll calls, and sexy moans. Sorokin's magic pen turns this framework into a mini-picaresque novel with a hero of sorts. Readers with some imagination will enjoy following Vadim and his co-queuers through their days and nights on line and off." -Library Journal

Mr. Sorokin demonstrates a remarkable ear for dialogue...Occasionally in its characters speechThe Queueresembles, as befits a colloquial account of an overnight queue,Waiting for Godot. Its humor, however, is broader and nowhere as stark.
The New York Times

"The Queue is a devastating satire of Soviet bureaucracy, and its message is made even more effective by the deadpan method chosen for its delivery...reminiscent of Kafka, Orwell and Beckett in their explorations of nightmare societies...It's ending is ironic and funny, while reinforcing the cynical tone of the whole novel and the impression that the Soviet Union is a vast, unmanageable bureaucracy." -Globe and Mail

Author Bio

Vladimir Sorokin was born in a small town outside of Moscow in 1955. He trained as an engineer at the Moscow Institute of Oil and Gas, but turned to art and writing, becoming a major presence in the Moscow underground of the 1980s. His work was banned in the Soviet Union, and his first novel, The Queue, was published by the famed emigre dissident Andrei Sinyavksy in France in 1983. In 1992, Sorokin's Collected Stories was nominated for the Russian Booker Prize; in 1999, the publication of the controversial novel Blue Lard, which included a sex scene between clones of Stalin and Khrushchev, led to public demonstrations against the book and to demands that Sorokin be prosecuted as a pornographer; in 2001, he received the Andrei Biely Award for outstanding contributions to Russian literature. Sorokin is also the author of the screenplays for the movies Moscow, The Kopeck, and 4, and of the libretto for Leonid Desyatnikov's The Children of Rosental, the first new opera to be commissioned by the Bolshoi Theater since the 1970s. He has written eleven novels, as well as numerous plays and short stories, and his work has been translated throughout the world. He lives in Moscow.