Vladimir Sorokin's Telluria
A highly editorial consideration of contemporary morality, ambition, and aesthetic consciousness as it relates to the recent English translation of one of Russia's most formidable novelists
There’s a strange line between evocation and innovation. Maybe an even stranger line between readers that demand too much of one side or the other. As if literature was meant solely to be a vessel where we think we see ourselves, but in a funny mirror we don’t identify as funny, leaving it to us to remember the difference between work and play; and on the other side, a wide gray area where no step can be called certain but by the sheer will of it having been typed into a page that somehow appears before the eyes of others, like it or not. It feels harder now than ever to distinguish what might be the point on either side: to pretend there are absolute answers an object of art, which all creative writing is by default, must reckon with to maintain value, and to provide that value to the impossibly amorphous idea of a reader; or to take by the “the way it is” by the lapels, animated by great fury maybe, or great remorse, and try at least to shake from it some sense of recourse against one’s experience of pain, which no matter who you are or where you’ve been, remains an incontrovertible part of any life. Should we pretend it isn’t there, the pain, aiming for revenge through our own assuagement, hoping against hope that we have gotten something right? Or should we lean into it, on the page, calling it out in front of anyone who bumbles over long enough to catch a whiff of our enchantment with that which, no matter what words you might use, cannot be named?
I don’t know. I find the question boring. I also find that in the back and forth between what feels like either side’s attempt to stamp their branding on the possibility of truth, something goes missing, which is that the experience of literature, indeed the soul of the concept of the novel, is neither meant to serve as entertainment, nor as scripture; neither a portrait nor a gaze; a window that won’t open, framing land that we can’t enter, despite the way it seems to be composed of the same stuff from where we stand. As a younger person, I might have argued, then, that works of language should serve primarily to knock our blocks off, more so reminding us what we are not than what we are; that the experience of the simulation by itself is works a faultline where the thing behind the thing comes flushing out. Sometimes that feels still true, but even in that, there remains a difference between authorial intent and what becomes of that in any given reader’s hands. I find myself thinking of the sword in the stone here for some reason, as if a book is a thing that must be unlocked; but then when I scan along the arms I imagine pulling the blade into the light, all I see is a bunch of corporate logo tattoos burned into the flesh of a kid who wants to hang out taking pictures of themselves with the sword to post online. Because if the kid had any drive to kill a “monster,” these days they’d much more likely go online and buy a gun.
If this feels like an inauspicious lead-in to my reading of Telluria, I suppose that is by design. Part of my reason for wanting to write about books again comes from a feeling that a lot of what used to be called criticism re: literature is more now not even clickbait, but disembodied copy pasta, designed to make you click the name inside your head and nothing more. They used to say it takes you hearing about something seven times before you will take action, but by now I can’t tell if seven seems too high or low, because I no longer remain certain what the wanted action is to take. What percentage of authors and even publishers actually want the work they make to be read, digested? If the answer is all of them, as it might should be, where do they imagine they’ll find they time? Why does it seem like more now than ever the publishing industry and especially the more and more completely corporatized and therefore politicized media surrounding it has an “ethos” like Menudo; not shit or get off the pot, but shit and get off the pot. If there could ever be a “there” there, or at least any kind of pleasure of relief, who has the time to see it through? And what exactly, in a world where everything now must have a “purpose” to garner its own frame, are we to do with whatever words you want to use for what is “gained” through its relation, if not implementation, beyond becoming more paltry yardsticks for morality, self-preservation, a reinforcement of the sameness of the sane?
I’ve found myself in recent years transformed from the sort of reader who would stick with anything on to its end—whether I was loving it or not, in hopes that somehow by the end it would transform itself, by a single sentence or paragraph that made the whole long slog “worth it,” to use a term that defeats the purpose of experience itself—to one who feels my eyes roll back inside my head, fleeing from language that pretends to know already where it’s going before it’s even gotten started, as if now that you’ve read one sentence, the rest is math; as if cause and effect could only be presented linearly, as a sort of call and response trapped inside the body of the book. The same situation befalls the author of work attempting to address the world and whip it with his moral and social desires for order as it does the slowly dying Lishian school of the sentence that insists there must be order and value applied to every utterance, never pure chaos; as if life could ever be so clean. Funny how realism’s project of attempting to reflect our lives fails by and large out of the impossibility of ever actually describing how things were—if you don’t believe that’s true, try writing down everything you saw, felt, did for even just the last five minutes, and have that stand up for how it felt to be you at that time.
Or how about Joan Didion’s provocative but ivory palace-like evocation of writing as a sort of chasing of one’s tail: “What's so hard about that first sentence is that you're stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you've laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.” What a load! When did literature become a prison where the inmates are in charge of holding up with their imagination the very walls that hold them in? How is that ideal any less masturbatory than works of supposed “stream of consciousness,” a term that these days gets applied to anything that doesn’t appear to have a plot installed on top of it to hold your hand from page to page? The part of me that feels I know what I know has often tried to tell me that I shouldn’t need to wonder, much less ask; that I should keep my head down and my hands on the keys and just keep going, let the shit fall where it does. But in being bored, by which I really more mean exasperated, I find myself now more than ever wanting to speak back into the hole, to ask who’s really in there, and why I’m still hanging around in hopes they’ll speak, and when they speak, that they’ll say something I can live with, or better yet, that I can’t, and that instead forces me to find a way to. I imagine this is why for many literature feels religious, in the seeking that without direct answers becomes a process that the reader has no choice but to walk alone, through a land where meditation, patience, and even spirituality have become so strung out it's hard to find a rail you trust on any side.
Enter Sorokin. Already a renowned and controversial superforce of avant garde Russian lit, 2022 has sparked the rise of Sorokin’s presence in American letters on the back of his longstanding open criticism of Putin and the Russian fascist state, as well as a flood of new and forthcoming translations from his 40 years of novels, stories, and theater, among which Telluria is only one of the most recent. Before Telluria, originally released in Russian in 2013, 1999’s Blue Lard—described by the author as a book about the death of Russian literature—put the author under a hot spotlight on the heels of pornographic distribution charges and riots among pro-Putin youths for the novel’s depiction of highly raunchy and hilarious sex scenes between Stalin and Khrushchev. Perhaps unlike other authors finding themselves at the center of a whirlwind of contentious renown, Sorokin refused to testify for Moscow police, explaining how the humiliation of being asked to explain his work, much less to have to see it destroyed, was a distraction, unnecessary to him outside his pages. At once unafraid to speak the truth, and unwilling to glorify himself in its defense, Sorokin’s spirit feels akin to Pynchon, whose encyclopedic, proto-campy, bawdy and soul-deep, genre-destructing style should serve for many as a benchmark for the post-historical multiverses found in Sorokin’s expansive and exhilarating body of work, though really any comparison between them is but a beginning.
Like Blue Lard (also forthcoming from NYRB)—where the spirits of famous Russian authors have been incubated into a controlled substance manufactured by the state—Telluria utilizes a clear conceptual thematic constraint that backgrounds the entire novel and shapes its form. Told through fifty different chapters, each wildly variant in technique, style, and diction, Telluria depicts a world where all the major European nations and their borders have been shaken to the wind as the result of holy war. Sorokin makes huge jumps without a net from one location to another, immediately immersing the reader in a sunken plotline mainly revolving around the rampant hunger for a mythic drug, tellurium, which is described as epically transcendent, leaving all other spiritual experiences from controlled substances in the dregs. Not only is telluria highly converted and hard to get one’s hands on, it also comes at a high cost: it must be administered as a spike driven into the user’s skull, frequently resulting in death if inaccurately done by even a hair. Like the V-2 in Gravity’s Rainbow, the titular presence of the drug casts the world of Telluria in a glow that seems to eat itself away even as the wide-ranging and often bizarre cast goes on about their lives as if it’d never been another way, so tied up in their day to day that they can barely see the forest of their own spiritual confinement for the trees of how it is.
Despite the would-be “pessimistic” setup, and the continuous underlying context of the abjection of its mores, reading Telluria feels kaleidoscopic, packed full of a ventriloquist’s array of constantly shifting ideas, approaches, and narrative forms. Personal letters, state-sponsored prayers, veiled fascist edicts, rumors, news reports, stage plays, epic poems, diaries, fake science, and formal propaganda are woven in among more traditional-seeming scenes featuring factory workers, bourgeois socialites, fairy tale transplants, counts, presidents, soldiers, secretaries, queens, carpenters, cannibals, captives, prostitutes, robots, knights, priests, and various historical figures and literary transplants. The year is uncertain, as is any hard sense of location. Flashes of socio-political historical context we feel we recognize are crammed in alongside slapstick gaffes, tongue-in-cheek satire, mythical asides, Biblical allusions, head-in-the-sand dialogues, monologues in obscure regional dialects, and countless other sorts of stylistic shifts and bends in tone, effectively begetting a Ulysses-like experience of waves of angles, voices, postures, and POVs. Throughout it all, Sorokin’s wit and eye for nuance allows the reader to need to learn to read between the lines, as like much high-wire satire with a real soul, this isn’t just a navel-gazer’s glide through plight for plight’s sake—not that that’d be bad. Instead, the silent desperation that we feel in watching the aftermath of the effects of centuries of politically religious turmoil begins to build up almost in spite of the pleasure of its depiction in Sorokin’s hands, causing a kind of slip-hole through which we feel the very fabric of any moral fiber we might still count on going lax, disintegrating in our hands. There’s an odd calmness and even pleasure in the barrage, which somehow reminds me of David Foster Wallace’s assertion that one cannot be boring when writing of boredom, if here inverted to apply instead to the helpless feeling that seems to overlay the from-all-direction-at-once array of desolation and brutality underwriting our present hour, whether we’re aware of it or not.
All of this is not to say that nothing happens in Telluria. Some sorts of readers seem to think that the lack of a “point,” or even a clear “path,” is evidence that the work itself is somehow lacking, as if the only reason the author might not try to tie things all together with a bow, or have some moral or lesson—perhaps in lieu of an experience of a “good time,” or enough positive hype to garner sales on hype now, which itself has veered into being deemed an accomplishment itself. Thinking now of Wallace realizing that the positive reviews he’d garnered for Infinite Jest in the early weeks of its release couldn’t have meant much, given the impossibility of digesting, much less analyzing, a 1100-page novel in due time, and now the same is true of almost any size book, given the micro window in which any pop-up entity has to be vociferously received during the era of big content, rated by clicks. “Art for art’s sake” gets used like it’s a curse, likely given the intangibility of presence outside hard metrics; a funny hair to split given the way most everything these days seems to exist mostly or solely for itself; to prop itself up, to seek out sources amidst the influx that provide any degree of confirmation bias, from science to religion, bogusly authenticating our individual existences on the backs of whatever brand we think is best. We still exist, after all, many seem content to remind themselves, from in the blur; and never mind the peasants who want to look beyond the edges of the cave—who (bleeping) wants to hear that (bleeping) (bleep), right? Bleep bleep bleep bleep, right, until you’re standing in a tub with your pants down getting reamed by a machine who thinks you’re bad because you need to breathe.
But getting back to being bored—and in response to what seems a more regular-than-ever tendency in recent American lit to want to lambast experimentation as navel gazing, void of truth—you’d have to be pretty hard-set in your ways, in need of a massage or something, to take no glee in Sorokin’s prodding. Even without a clear, continuous linear narrative, the intentionally disruptive jerk and pull of shapeshifting through new narrators on every page, the body of Telluria feels quite compact, and quite more effective in relating its experience of modernity than a quainter approach that hopes to hold its reader close at hand. A bizarre stew of hard sci-fi alongside classicism, high-brow line-play bred with parable, slithers like a tapeworm through the brain, imbuing subtle nuance to the absurd, and a continuous tinge of forthcoming derangement to the norm. Tiny dramas, loaded with asides and fleeting images, pass across the page like all the moments we can’t keep, following intuition and rhythm over a need to see a plotline through or make it mesh the rest. Science can’t help us out, either, as it too has been infected by the State, subjected to the same misinformation as might be found in any human’s highly malleable brain. History doesn’t live in digits and tallies, after all, any more than it does in highly polished packets with a beginning, middle, and end. It lives as much in the uncertain and unspoken as it is in the feelings and understandings that exist behind our words; the thinking, wanting foam of consciousness that makes the code tick and carry meaning when we read.
Within that wake, the top-floor brilliance of Telluria, as a concept, comes through how it portrays the basic quality of life from within a state of being so disrupted and degraded that those within it can no longer even tell they’ve got a prob. Many scenes focus on various voices scheming how they might get their hands on some tellurium, while others brag about their wealth of transcendent experience derived from using, though we rarely if ever witness an actual experience of the drug’s transcendence but secondhand. Others evoke conversations between heads of state or blue-collar workers going about their life, ranging from depictions of what the “everyday” is like, to narrators who seem brain damaged and unable to actually relate anything for certain, creating a continuous friction throughout the book no matter how far apart one setup splits off of the others. Still further abstract worldbuilding occurs not as direct preaching or even good old honest protean fury, but through legalese or worshipful lip service, in which the depiction of a world far too disconnected to bear any hope outside of drugs, itself feel hopeful in that we are still able to label and identify it, to feel foreboding from the deep pathos and madness written into the very soul that book has been designed to reveal through pure immersion, like a simulation of a fate it becomes less and less hard to imagine playing out without the feedback of a literature intended not simply to reflect the present, but to evoke the depths of certain hell. The knowing reader must ascertain for themselves, finally, a textural experience that manifests not as a story or a sales pitch, finally, but as an antidote to its own farce—and so its terror.
We see this especially as Sorokin turns the heat up on his satire, both in approach and context, such as with the novel’s penultimate chapter, which takes the form of a simultaneously sarcastic and quasi-earnest redux of Ginsberg’s “Howl,” which begins: “I saw the worst minds of my generation torn out of black madness by tellurium, minds / who overcame the quotidian morass of the swap of an ordinary life.” The trick here comes from wielding the very same headcase logic that extreme beliefs beget in those for whom the eventual solution against “evil” can only be delivered through the willful selection of perspective, even if that perspective supposedly aligns itself with something greater, a deus ex machina event that has yet to be applied. In Telluria, the apparent mourning of the pervasive worship of the totality-altering drug, is proof itself that the narrator’s emotion has been misplaced; that even those who think they can see through the mire of the present have been mistaken and offered solace by furtive forces that know better than to present themselves directly on the page. The menace of a new Dark Ages is that much larger, more divorced from progress than any narrator even could imagine from inside it; they are damned to want more and to not know better than to know that they don’t know.
So there are all these elements we recognize as shards of now, historical figures and places, emotional ideologies we want to empathize with, desires we wish we could take at face value even while realizing they’ve been rewired, forced into future shadows of their shapes that make their appearance in the wake of all else strangled, familiar and alien at once. There’s a great trust purveyed from Sorokin’s authorial silence behind his many sorts of mask, one that even as we watch the seemingly unknowing citizens of sprawl continue to divulge themselves into the hands of the unseen reins held by the void created by the pervading essence of the State at large feels somehow hopeful for how it doesn’t need to bleed out all it knows. I’ve found myself thinking recently about “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” and how outdated the idea that a figurehead would even need to parade around flaunting his fashion feels given the bodilessness of postmodern bureaucracy. I much prefer the procedural leveling of the playing field assumed by Sorokin’s deft portrayal of heads of state as dolts who want to get high and fuck like everybody else. The novel sprawls like a grim, still-frame tableau at times, leaving the reader to cast their eye over the wreckage as those within it fail to see the writing on the wall, much less how their behavior only deepens and enlivens the dismay, already so down in the pits there’s no way out but to pretend.
Some might be surprised to realize Sorokin is devoutly Christian, given his penchant for fractious imagery and chaos, but rather than be kowtowed into using his morality as a mirror in which to bask, there is a silent urgency allowed to fester in the grace with which he transports the reader on through time, mixing mad dystopia with an even more grim connotation, left unheeded: given time, no one is spared, and the price of our desire for revelation, especially when masqueraded as a pleasure, is not only our own lives, but our way of being, not only now, but for generations past and future, transforming who and how we are beyond repair. In this way, given a time in American entertainment where what sells best often feels like preaching to the choir, and anything that breaks the mold must be slapped up with authoritative qualifiers, always relating back to either someone’s persona or their sales, it’s here where the “there there” gains space to shine. There are rule books and prayer books, and there are books that somehow manage instead to grasp the sprawl, to pull it down out of our imagination of reality and feed it back into us, the way a vaccine exposes the system ahead of time against new illness. Perhaps this is more like what DFW meant by wanting fiction that works on its reader like CPR; not a curative, but an opportunity to listen, and to see the world from innumerable sides at the same time, at once more realistic than realism, and far enough ahead that there’s still some far horizon left ahead to want to touch.
It feels clear, at least, that Sorokin wants to push back at the foreshortened perspective that has arrested not only the Russian novel, but all novels, in search of a means of purveying something more, while also remaining free and unafraid to chase his encyclopedic experimental impulses. Among the six tenets of a great story outlined by Chekhov, way back in 1888, Sorokin feels indebted to really only one:
Absence of lengthy verbiage of a political-social-economic nature
Total objectivity
Truthful descriptions of persons and objects
Extreme brevity
Audacity and originality: flee the stereotype
Compassion
Why must experimentation by dint, Sorokin’s work asks, pretend to avoid trying to claw the wool off our eyes? In doing so, how could one ever presume to remain “totally objective,” when so much of what we experience can never be named? Where does the truth lie in a tyrant, or a peasant, and who’s to say what really speaks about their soul? How could one ever actually think they could be objective and truthful in the presentation of reality while also never varying from neat, tight lines, never sprawling into chaos and gray area, as if the author is a god? Nowhere is the author a god but in their own imagination, and to think otherwise regarding one’s ability to create would seem to all but guarantee their utter failure. Too much fiction wants to think that because the author said it, so it is, rather than allowing an engagement by way of texture, association, confabulation, and collage, to allow the text to knit its own ground, as if learning from itself as it appears. Sorokin remains unafraid to riff and run, allowing fractured moments of great weight to slip between the cracks in his own yarn, such as this pair of paragraphs that pop up like a buoy in a chapter comprised of bureaucrats debating their own complicity in evil:
Solovyova silently unbuttoned her jacket, bared her right shoulder, and turned to Kim. A living tattoo seethed in crimson on that shoulder: a heart and crossbones. The heart shuddered rhythmically.
Kim stared at the heart.
This being the character’s reason for why they couldn’t have been complicit in an “accidental” atrocity, qualified further by her plea that all she wants is “to make our postwar life happy. So that my son grows up to be a happy man.” As if the mere want for pursuit of actual happiness precludes the speaker from their own complicity in the creation of pain and suffering. As if we close our eyes and promise to be good, all of our troubles will go away, like a magic wand. In Sorokin, often the subtext speaks as loudly or even louder than the surface text all on its own, creating a kind of set of chutes and ladders to explore, framed in the playfulness and syllabic magic the author imbues not just into sentences, but into the mind behind them.
Sentences, after all, are only part the process. One of the biggest traps befallen the extremely experimental set in wanting more appears to be this unending reliance on letting language be the bad boy, while still saying nothing more than could have been said more clearly, leaving the idea itself to hide behind the dresses of its maker. Sorokin’s prose becomes magical, amorphous, because it intends to tackle something larger than a single sentence can portray, while also remaining open to how the utterance, the ridiculous, and the unruly must butt their heads into any ingenuously leaning attempt to cauterize the wound of history into a pile of images, parables, and supposedly impossible ideas. In Telluria’s case, the elegance of the form—using exactly 50 mostly rather short chapters, each aligned with different perspectives, places, and ambitions, and tons of dialogue—corresponds so well with the apparent premise—that life has become so degraded in dissolution that there’s no true center to the story, and that instead it must be gleaned, woven in the mind—that it feels as if we’ve finally struck a noble balance between signifier and signified, enough so that once the book is over, the book still feels open, as if it’s being written while we speak.
Even where Sorokin does tap Chekhov, re: audacity, it remains a complicated inheritance, as the immense style with which Sorokin does his job feels less intentionally provocative than it does immersive. The icing on the cake here is how fantastically entertaining and satisfying Sorokin’s innumerable micro-narratives are, no matter how large-scale horrifying and unnerving they might be, culling up the kind of laughs that ache same as they tickle. Memories and desires woven among the multitude of characters hearken back through time to pin us to the present from which we read, even as we can see the trail going lopped off in our future, losing our bead in the same way the people in this book have. “Back then, many things were strange,” an unnamed speaker in a dialogue in Chapter 30 waxes, referring to the past in a way that feels at once disorienting and close to heart. “A receiver was called a television, and for some reason they always used it to show either people getting killed or funny stuff.” In snippets like these, we manifest evidence that at least some shred of the cast of Telluria still retain aware of what had once been their humanity—compassion, recognition, shared experience, notions of change—but they can no longer seem to remember how it relates to where they are now, much less the level of cope required to maintain the fact that they don’t think they need to cope at all. It’s not only the novel that’s been fractured, therefore; it’s the souls of the people, how they are.
In its manifesting, here and now, this shared spirit across states, translator Max Lawton’s shrewd sense of play accelerates Telluria with jewel-box level poise, establishing a high sense of formal play alongside Sorokin’s willingness to unnerve and poke fun, as one might someone trapped inside a hall of mirrors during the end times. Heavily playful and even invented syntax and entities, fragmented among sprawl, allow a running tint of the ineffable trapped in the everyday, even as we begin to feel the rising heat lapping our asses as we persist in seeking resolution in a field where little more than degradation holds the bind: brooden grounds, golden hammers up their asses, daddy-prayer’d, whi-i-i-ite li-i-i-i-ight, fastun, bigun, peckers, post-cynic, juicy flick, PodMoscovian, God-forsakenness, hyperpotato, gas terminals, ‘cunted up,’ The Millenium of Truth, slippery lambada, smartypants, Three Fingered Thief, the guy with the dog meat, zoomorphic Zarathustra, goggled malevolently, iconostasis, Beanpole-7, Crooked-5. The transient cryptic-ness with which these entities and objects appear and disappear, over the course of the book, provides a more alchemical, poetic aesthetic, seamlessly veering from simplistic to spastic, tight-lipped to absurd, in a way that makes the time-punk aspects of the prose feel more electric, close to the heart of the utterance. As it accrues, we find ourselves at once tangled in aesthetic pleasure and at odds an experience that seems to remind us of the resounding differences of our present world even given the obvious correlations derived from its socio-political bite back, and the impossibility of ever knowing what it’s like to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes.
In this way, Telluria at times feels like the camerawork of Aleksei German’s Hard to Be a God installed on top of scenes from Brave New World, or maybe the slickly perverse topography of a Peter Greenaway film bred with the leering plunge-feel of Lord of the Flies—a timeless classic forced by the rhizome to mutate in its own juices, having become so clear a way to see the problems with our world that we can no longer remember how it actually appends to how we are—like choking on your breakfast thinking of a hidden dick joke in the funnies in the paper on the backside of a page that describes the recent causalities of war in names and numbers, far too real to still feel real. “I love human love mortally, to the point of insanity,” admits the obsequious narrator of chapter 19, “so much that it turns my heart cold. That’s why I work in a hotel.” Even as we cling to fragments of stories and understandings the novel continuously summons like shadows, we can only dig so far into the rubble before we ourselves have become buried by it, able to remember who we are only in that this is a novel, not our life. Which itself feels like a proper antidote to clickbait culture, requiring your attendance at the event itself and not the sign, which supposedly is the way it works with all things, though why so often then the empty feeling, and what clear difference between scenes and text and what arrives within them, often in a way that cannot be described. Why you’d ever want to read something that someone can explain the supposed “meaning” or apparent intent of in other, much more succinct verbiage, I don’t know either. That’s your problem.
As for compassion: to write, itself, is a barbaric act (I say this with equal parts resignation and relish). But to me, it is exactly this barbarism, when it is able to interrupt the illusions we design to keep ourselves safe, that is what gives writing, reading, thinking, its inherent power. Imre Kertesz: "I regard as kitsch any representation of the Holocaust that is incapable of understanding or unwilling to understand the organic connection between our own deformed mode of life (whether in the private sphere or on the level of 'civilization' as such) and the very possibility of the Holocaust." This is not to say, of course, that the author must be cruel, cold, walled off; quite the opposite, given the depth of field required to stand at the center of the eye of the storm and calmly crack wise. We’re all speaking in an invented language, after all, the edge of which only appears to have a border when clamped up on by would-be arbiters of how we “should” think, what all together we “should” want. Sorokin’s mastery appears not from a pulpit, but from the great poise that he shows while walking through fields of fire and rubble, with a target on his back even in his homeland, understood the most only at the cost of having spoken up, for the eternal record, as no one else could. That’s called a hero. Say what you want about the dead, the impossibility of being, the futility of anything, but no matter what you say, since we’re still here, we still need heroes, and not the kind that wear a white cape, much less the kind that only really do it for their own glory, as if hope and prayers alone can keep the curtain from coming down, or that, when it does, anyone can sell you for certain on what comes next.
I’ll say it again: a novel is a novel, not a life. The morals of the novel exist inside the novel, which exists inside our world and not the other way around—and gratefully, we are allowed to have a look without burning our skin off, so that the experience itself might harbor change through imagination and relation rather than judgement and the overlording rule of law, whether its shell calls itself democratic or fascistic, realistic or ridiculous, in the past or in the future; unspeakable or here and now. By his sheer persistence, his brutal humor, his ambitiousness to go where most would rather not, Sorokin’s vision serves, at least we hope, as a reminder that it’s not already too late, which is a much different mode of hope than that derived, as with so much other would-be traditional and experimental literature, both, from simply holding your breath and closing your eyes.
Telluria is out now from NYRB Classics / 352 pp. / $18.95
It's a welcome thing, to hear you writing about books again.