Customer Reviews

The Queue (New York Review Books Classics)

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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

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.

...

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

The author of "The Queue" has become recently one of the most popular writers in Russia. "The Queue" is an instance of Sorokin's early writings and is free of his later excessive exploitation of sex/drug/alcohol abuse scenes. This as well might be due to the difficulty of including one when the action in the book is constantly taking place in or around a crowded public area.

The text is better described not as a novel but as a prose poem of the size which is exaggerated far beyond the bounds of decency. The first few pages might be of certain interest to a professional in Slavic languages. The translator certainly deserves a high praise at least for his patience in reading all of the two hundred pages of dialogs between tens of unnamed heroes of the book. In my opinion, Venedikt Erofeev's "Moscow-Petushki" is a more curious, humorous and literary valuable item of this genre and time.