Telluria

Name: Telluria
Brand: Tantor Audio
Availability: InStock
Author: Vladimir Sorokin
ISBN: 9798765072066

Author: Vladimir Sorokin, Max Lawton

Narrator: David Aranovich

Unabridged: 12 hr 58 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 01/31/2023

Categories: Fiction, Dystopian

Synopsis

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.

About Vladimir Sorokin

Vladimir Sorokin was born in a small town outside of Moscow in 1955. He trained as an engineer at the Moscow Institute of Oil and Gas but turned to art and writing, becoming a major presence in the Moscow underground of the 1980s. His work was banned in the Soviet Union, and his first novel, The Queue (available as an NYRB Classic), was published by the famed emigre dissident Andrei Sinyavsky in France in 1985. In 1992, Sorokin's Their Four Hearts was short-listed for the Russian Booker Prize; in 1999, the publication of the controversial novel Blue Lard, which included a sex scene between clones of Stalin and Khrushchev, led to public demonstrations against the book and demands that Sorokin be prosecuted as a pornographer; in 2001, he received the Andrei Bely Award for outstanding contributions to Russian literature. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages. Sorokin is also the author of the screenplays for Moscow, The Kopeck, and 4, and of the libretto for Leonid Desyatnikov's The Children of Rosenthal, the first new opera to be commissioned by the Bolshoi Theater since the 1970s. He has written numerous plays and short stories, including the O. Henry Award winner "Horse Soup," which will appear in Red Pyramid, a volume of stories forthcoming from NYRB Classics. His most recent novel is Doctor Garin. He lives in Vnukovo and Berlin.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Glenn on February 03, 2024

First published in 2013, Vladimir Sorokin's Telluria is a novel composed of fifty chapters, some short and some long, each chapter featuring its own set of characters and written in a singular style: fantasy, science fiction, social realism, lampoon, sermon, stage play, epistolary exchange, romance,......more

Goodreads review by Paul on January 14, 2023

Enter the weird and wonderful world of Vladimir Sorokin. Set in a future where Russia has split into a multiplicity of independent states and where the drug of choice is tellurium. The novel consists of 50 episodic chapters, all set in the same world but (mostly, there are a couple of exceptions tha......more

Goodreads review by David on November 27, 2023

Sorokin's feudal vision of the future, where Europe is dismantled into hyper-nationalist sectarian states following Holy War with a jihadist Taliban feels eerily prescient for a book that counts among its cast of characters an animated phallus, biguns (giants) and littluns (dwarves), zoomorphs (DNA-......more

Goodreads review by cycads and ferns on November 26, 2024

Fifty short stories of a dystopian world after a global religious war. The stories each have a different point of view and are set in different locations around the globe. They are written in the form of prayers, a song, proclamations, a news broadcast, letters, or even a poem that reimagines Allen......more

Goodreads review by Bhaskar on September 22, 2022

I SAW THE worst minds of my generation torn out of black madness by tellurium, minds who overcame the quotidian morass of the swamp of an ordinary life, who cast the concrete crust of idiotic self-assurance and dull complacency off from their souls, who trampled the chimera of earthly predestination in......more