The Queue
by Vladimir Sorokin

First published in 1985, six years before the collapse of the political environment that serves as both its subject and its setting, Vladimir Sorokin’s The Queue delineates human society by zeroing in on a massive line of people in a Muscovite suburb in the 1970s. During and around that period it was perfectly normal for a citizen to fall in line and wait for his turn to buy imported quality goods, even when he’s unsure of the length of time he had to endure before he finally arrived at the head of the line and more unsure of the exact nature of the products he’s about to purchase. In The Queue, Sorokin, a writer who clearly possesses a sharp eye for the minutiae of life ordinary, presents an often amusing analysis of the quotidian phenomenon that is the queue and shows off its little-known and seldom acknowledged capacity for social commentaries and personal revelations.

Queues, particularly the long and winding ones, were ordinary occurrences in Soviet Russia. Just ask Sorokin himself, who, in his afterword to the novel, waxes nostalgic about the disappearance of the monster queue upon the dissolution of the Soviet era. But while The Queue may sound like a ballad dedicated to days gone by, right at the outset the contemporary relevance of this quarter-century-old novel is already hinted at, beginning as it does with a newcomer uttering a variation of a question frequently asked today in light rail transit stations, ATM booths, Apple product launches, and disaster relief goods distribution centers: “Comrade, who’s last in the queue?” It’s a question, it turns out, that was more frequently asked then. Back in the Soviet era whenever something from abroad was put up for sale, be it a heap of American blue jeans, a stockpile of Turkish footwear, or a collection of Japanese electronic appliances, people were naturally expected to line up by the thousands. Sorokin makes a spectacle out of this observation in his novel, where he conjures up a formidable group of characters, most of them unnamed and only a handful of them brought to the fore of the story, compelled to queue up for whatever is waiting for them—or, rather, whatever they’re supposed to be waiting for—at the head of the line.

—They’re nice imported ones, I saw them.
—I couldn’t get up there. Couldn’t even get near.
—I saw some that a woman had got.
—Nice colour?
—Quite nice—greyish-brown.
—Suede-look?
—Uh-huh.
—Nonsense, young man. They’re leather.
—Leather?
—Really?
—They can’t be, I saw them myself…
—Quite right, but they only had the suede type this morning; they ran out by lunchtime. Now they’re leather—dark brown.
—Oh, hell.

The Queue is, from start to finish, true to its name. Structurally it’s nothing more than a sequence of sentences, phrases, fragments, interjections, omissions, and even unintelligible murmurs. It does away with any and all traditional forms of narration, description, and authorial intervention and operates instead with a succession of quotation dashes and unattributed lines of dialogue, as exemplified by the foregoing excerpt. In the absence of dashes and dialogue there is only silence, a break in the narrative, if it can be called that, in the form of blank acid-free pages signifying the queuers’ collective suspension of consciousness, their taking refuge in sleep after a day of waiting, talking, complaining, arguing, pushing, roll-calling, smoking, drinking, and trying their luck at love. Yes, love and life and Levi’s.

A singularly engaging debut novel by one of the most luminous figures of contemporary Russian literature, The Queue is unabashedly postmodern. In its justified peculiarity a microcosm teeming with the absurdities of everyday life emerges; a celebration of organized chaos as the oxymoronic term applies to human society the novel, if indeed it can be called that, becomes.