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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 émigré 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. »
Sally Laird is the editor of Voices of Russian Literature: Interviews with Ten Contemporary Writers, and is the translator of many books, including The Time: Night by Ludmila Petrushevskaya. »
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The Queue
With a new afterword by the Author
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
Mr. Sorokin demonstrates a remarkable ear for dialogue... Occasionally in its characters' speech, The Queue resembles, 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
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
If queues were arranged in order of merit, it would only be fair to put the young Soviet writer Vladimir Sorokin at the head.
— The Guardian (London)
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Format: Paperback
Retail Price: $14.95
Price: $11.21 (25% off)
Oct 7, 2008
280 pages
ISBN: 1590172744
9781590172742
NYRB Classics
Literature in Russian
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