The Queue (New York Review Books Classics) [Paperback]

Vladimir Sorokin (Author, Afterword), Sally Laird (Translator)

Book Description

Series: New York Review Books Classics | Publication Date: October 7, 2008

Vladimir Sorokin’s first published novel, The Queue, is a sly comedy about 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 anything is on sale, you better line up to buy it. Sorokin’s tour de force of ventriloquism and formal daring tells the whole story in snatches of unattributed dialogue, adding up to nothing less than the real voice of the people, overheard on the street as they joke and curse, fall in and out of love, slurp down ice cream or vodka, fill out crossword puzzles, even go to sleep and line up again in the morning as the queue drags on.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

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. Mary F. Zirin, Altadena, Cal.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

[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

 

"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

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Product Details

• Paperback: 280 pages
• Publisher: NYRB Classics; First Edition edition (October 7, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590172744
• ISBN-13: 978-1590172742
• Product Dimensions: 5 x 0.6 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #466,465 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Perhaps better suited for the stage?, December 30, 2008

By 

Leonard Fleisig "Len" (Washington, D.C.) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Queue (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)

Jean Cocteau wrote that a line is life and that "[w]ith the writer, line takes precedence over form and content." In his first novel, "The Queue", Vladimir Sorokin, takes a different sort of line and manages to have the life of that line take precedence over the form and structure of a traditional novel. The result is a moderate success.

Set in Moscow during the Brezhnev era a random group of strangers form up in a line to purchase some unknown sort of consumer product and spend more than a day waiting in line to purchase the unknown product. The book plays out as a series of random conversations along the line. People come and go, they fight over their place, complain about the sales clerks and the apparatchiks who jump the queue, flirt, sleep, and complain some more. As noted by Sorokin in an afterward to this edition, "an era can be judged by street conversations", and that is exactly what he sets out to do.

The snippets of conversation are funny, ironic, and revealing. They reflect very well, in my opinion, an era in which the desire for consumer goods outweighed the ability of the USSR to produce and sell them. The result was a society in which lines were ubiquitous and an accepted (if grudgingly so) fact of life.

The concept and structure of the book was fascinating to me. The snippets of conversations sounded authentic and were often both humorous and subversive. However, the very structure which made the book sound so intriguing also served to diminish my enjoyment of it. The characters were anonymous and the ebb and flow of conversations were a bit hard for me to track. As often happens when you are on a line you often come into the middle of a conversation, or hear only snatches of it, and can only grasp at the whole meaning. That's not a bad thing and is a natural enough occurrence in `real life'. However, the disjointed nature of the text was a bit jarring to read. I could keep track of the various anonymous characters that pass along the line for the most part but I often found myself scrolling back to place some of the text in context.

I did enjoy reading "The Queue" but I kept thinking as I turned the pages that this is dialogue that would work better on a stage where it can be heard and seen. I think a staged production of this book could be excellent. Ultimately, I think of The Queue as an experiment in form that didn't quite work. However, the writing itself was witty and insightful and did paint a pretty evocative, satiric picture of life in Moscow during what Sorokin (and others) refer to as the period of stagnation. Sorokin's Afterword is a valuable addition to the text and I wonder if it wouldn't serve the reader to be read as a preface rather than an afterword.

I do recommend this book even though I think the work itself would be better performed than read. It does require some concentration but there are enough brilliantly written `snippets' to make the experience worthwhile. I think The Queue would be of particular interest to those with an interest in Soviet literature and history since I think they are more likely to `get' many of the asides and self-referential jokes made in the text.
L. Fleisig

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book is a MUST, March 31, 2002

By 

KniQUE (San Fran CA, USA; Minsk, Belarus) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Queue (Hardcover)

If you're wondering how people lived and survived in the Soviet Union, or if you just want to read a book full of innovations (in terms of style) and bitter humor, this book is for you. I read it in both in Russian and in English and either way, it's great! The whole book is in form of dialogue, which makes it easy to read and to follow (sometimes).

It includes a sex scene... only dialog, no descriptions, one of the most powerful scenes i've read. Your mind has to produce images while your eyes see phrases, of cource, it's the same with the rest of the book.

Sorokin's style in The Queue is much milder than what he has now, less postmodernism, more realism, but the format is simply outstanding.

I recommend this book to all beginning writers and people who enjoy a nice well-written book once in a while.

...

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Something akin to a David Lunch movie., May 21, 2009

By 

Dennis R. Mitton "tolstoy" (Eastern Washington, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Queue (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)

What an odd little book. I can see a David Lynch movie here with the camera never moving - only actors coming in and out of the scene.

The book is written entirely in dialogue. It's a pure Russian story that takes place as people wait in line for something. That something is never revealed even to those in line. Readers of avant garde fiction will enjoy it as will writers. I marveled at the conversational flow. Read it outloud fast and straight through and it's like listening to a tape recording while standing in line. There's nothing contrived or forced.

It's a bit tough to keep track of the players - they frequently come and go as the line moves - but it feels exactly like being stuck in line with strangers. It's not an easy read and I wouldn't recommend it for pleasure reading. For those interested, though, it's worth the go