NYRD
Koosi reads The Queue
I just finished reading Vladimir Sorokin’s The Queue, a novel written entirely as a series of dialogues among thousands of people standing in line in a Moscow suburb in the 1980s. They don’t know what they’re queuing up for—it could be jackets or jeans, made in Turkey or Sweden, all they have to go on are rumors—but they queue up anyway, because that’s what one did in the Soviet years of stagnation, queue up. The speakers are not identified, so we don’t know who’s saying what to whom; they jostle, flirt, argue over their place in line, fall asleep, find little ways to make the wait more bearable, gossip, go off to eat and drink, come back and wait some more. Amidst this deluge of information the reader should’ve developed a giant headache but, amazingly, you start recognizing the characters. They resist being dehumanized by the system represented by the queue. In a society where there are supposedly no individuals, they can’t help but be individuals.
The Queue, an NYRB Classic, is available at National Bookstore Shangrila, Rockwell, Glorietta, Mall of Asia, Bestsellers Podium and Bestsellers Robinson’s Galleria.
NYRD in Emotional Weather Report, today in the Star.
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