Telluria

De: Vladimir Sorokin, Max Lawton - translator

Narrado por: David Aranovich

Telluria is set in the future, when a devastating holy war between Europe and Islam has succeeded in returning the world to the torpor and disorganization of the Middle Ages. Europe, China, and Russia have all broken up. The people of the world now live in an array of little nations that are like puzzle pieces, each cultivating its own ideology or identity, a neo-feudal world of fads and feuds, in which no one power dominates. What does, however, travel everywhere is the appetite for the special substance tellurium. A spike of tellurium, driven into the brain by an expert hand, offers a transforming experience of bliss; incorrectly administered, it means death.

The fifty chapters of Telluria map out this brave new world from fifty different angles, as Vladimir Sorokin, always a virtuoso of the word, introduces us to, among many other figures, partisans and princes, peasants and party leaders, a new Knights Templar, a harem of phalluses, and a dog-headed poet and philosopher who feasts on carrion from the battlefield. The book is an immense and sumptuous tapestry of the word, carnivalesque and cruel, and Max Lawton, Sorokin's gifted translator, has captured it in an English that carries the charge of Cormac McCarthy and William Gibson.

©2013 Vladimir Sorokin; Translation copyright 2022 by Max Lawton (P)2023 Tantor

A Twisted and Grotesque Russian Masterpiece

Not for the faint of heart, or stomach, Telluria is a grotesque, absurd, and often emotionally touching anthology of 50 interconnected chapters of varying genre, tone, and absurdity. Sorokin jumps from both grounded and deeply experimental points of view. This includes everything from a horse who thinks in Old Church Slavonic (here in translation Old English), to a sentient male member. This occurs primarily across the ruins of a dystopian and nigh post-apocalyptic of an imagined future Russia. Sections featuring a neo-feudal Europe (featuring Neo-Future Taliban in giant mechs) is less effective, but does not detract too much from the novel’s highpoints.

Exceedingly bizarre and sometimes unwieldy, Telluria’s dark satire of the Russian national character and current political trajectory is unfortunately even more prescient than when this book was written in 2013.

Both Max Lawton’s translation and the narrator clearly understand and enjoy the work - effectively using English language tone and subtext (such as drawls, and drug addled screaming madness) to mirror the intent of the work in its original Russian. A must-read (or listen) for any and all seeking to understand contemporary Russia.

Meh

it's irritating that this shows up on so many lists of the best Soviet sci-fi because it wasn't written during the Soviet period and is pretty thoroughly anti Soviet. I don't know exactly what the author is about but he does go on at length about it. The reader is good though. As for the author... I wouldn't waste your time.