The Queue [Paperback]

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.

[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 Queuedispenses 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 lonlc