queue crm review
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(as of Jan 02, 2025 02:55:15 UTC - Details)
Vladimir Sorokin’s first published novel, The Queue, is a sly comedy about the late Soviet “years of stagnation.” Thousands of citizens are in line for . . . nobody knows quite what, but the rumors are flying. Leather or suede? Jackets, jeans? Turkish, Swedish, maybe even American? It doesn’t matter–if anything is on sale, you better line up to buy it. Sorokin’s tour de force of ventriloquism and formal daring tells the whole story in snatches of unattributed dialogue, adding up to nothing less than the real voice of the people, overheard on the street as they joke and curse, fall in and out of love, slurp down ice cream or vodka, fill out crossword puzzles, even go to sleep and line up again in the morning as the queue drags on.
Publisher : NYRB Classics; First Edition (October 7, 2008)
Language : English
Paperback : 280 pages
ISBN-10 : 1590172744
ISBN-13 : 978-1590172742
Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
Dimensions : 5.01 x 0.6 x 7.98 inches
Reviewer: Fashionforward
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Five Stars
Review: Good read
Reviewer: Liz
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Reading this is exactly like listening in on someone elseâs conversation
Review: The whole book takes place in a line, waiting for unknown goods, in Moscow. The book is written entirely comprised of one-liners between the Soviet people waiting in line. Reading this is exactly like listening in on someone elseâs conversation. As I read this I felt as though I was in line waiting to and listening to the conversation all around me.The Queue manages to give readers a view of the time and place. We are able to see a society interact and understand peopleâs emotions just by reading one-liners. Whether the conversation is between mother and son, neighbors, friends, strangers, or lovers I felt as though I learned a lot about these people through simple conversation. The reader never learns what they are standing in line for and it appears the people in the book donât know either. It doesnât seem to matter though, if there is a line people will stand in it.In Vladimir Sorokinâs afterward he says, âAn era can be judged by street conversations.â and after reading his book I completely agree. Even though I didnât know any of the characterâs names or stories I felt I was able to understand Soviet Russia better.
Reviewer: Sergej Ostojic
Rating: 3.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Nice work, but other books by Vladimir Sorokin are ...
Review: Nice work, but other books by Vladimir Sorokin are much better or sophisticated.In this book Sorokin just started to develop his well-known style of writing that flourished in Day of the Oprichnik and Der Zuckerkreml.
Reviewer: S. Smith-Peter
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: An avant-garde fairy tale
Review: This book consists only of dialogue. The subject is the collective, not the individual. Thus, we do not experience the story through only one character. The point is to be surrounded by the sound of the Soviet line. This reminds me of the work of the artist Ilya Kabakov, who has created installations in which the viewer is surrounded by unseen collective commentary.These lines formed all the time, and there was a highly developed social script that governed behavior in these lines. Therefore, we are experiencing a ritual, one that in some ways parallels earlier Orthodox traditions such as the all-night vigil, which, like all Orthodox services, requires participants to stand.Although the book is formally avant garde, the story is easy to follow. it follows a man who is waiting in line for some sort of product, although no one knows exactly what it is. He hooks up with two different women during this process and the ending is rather like a fairy tale.Many people in Russia today have a great deal of nostalgia for the Brezhnev era, and this book more than any other has helped me to understand this phenomenon. Everyone in the line is more or less equal. Even though this may be an equality based on deprivation, the book shows how a sense of community was quickly and powerfully established. And everyone in the line also had a great deal of time to be disposed of.
Reviewer: KniQUE
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: This book is a MUST
Review: If you're wondering how people lived and survived in the Soviet Union, or if you just want to read a book full of innovations (in terms of style) and bitter humor, this book is for you. I read it in both in Russian and in English and either way, it's great! The whole book is in form of dialogue, which makes it easy to read and to follow (sometimes). It includes a sex scene... only dialog, no descriptions, one of the most powerful scenes i've read. Your mind has to produce images while your eyes see phrases, of cource, it's the same with the rest of the book. Sorokin's style in The Queue is much milder than what he has now, less postmodernism, more realism, but the format is simply outstanding. I recommend this book to all beginning writers and people who enjoy a nice well-written book once in a while....
Reviewer: kurt
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title: He liked it.
Review: Gift for father in law. He liked it.
Reviewer: Lonya53
Rating: 3.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Perhaps better suited for the stage?
Review: Jean Cocteau wrote that a line is life and that "[w]ith the writer, line takes precedence over form and content." In his first novel, "The Queue", Vladimir Sorokin, takes a different sort of line and manages to have the life of that line take precedence over the form and structure of a traditional novel. The result is a moderate success.Set in Moscow during the Brezhnev era a random group of strangers form up in a line to purchase some unknown sort of consumer product and spend more than a day waiting in line to purchase the unknown product. The book plays out as a series of random conversations along the line. People come and go, they fight over their place, complain about the sales clerks and the apparatchiks who jump the queue, flirt, sleep, and complain some more. As noted by Sorokin in an afterward to this edition, "an era can be judged by street conversations", and that is exactly what he sets out to do.The snippets of conversation are funny, ironic, and revealing. They reflect very well, in my opinion, an era in which the desire for consumer goods outweighed the ability of the USSR to produce and sell them. The result was a society in which lines were ubiquitous and an accepted (if grudgingly so) fact of life.The concept and structure of the book was fascinating to me. The snippets of conversations sounded authentic and were often both humorous and subversive. However, the very structure which made the book sound so intriguing also served to diminish my enjoyment of it. The characters were anonymous and the ebb and flow of conversations were a bit hard for me to track. As often happens when you are on a line you often come into the middle of a conversation, or hear only snatches of it, and can only grasp at the whole meaning. That's not a bad thing and is a natural enough occurrence in `real life'. However, the disjointed nature of the text was a bit jarring to read. I could keep track of the various anonymous characters that pass along the line for the most part but I often found myself scrolling back to place some of the text in context.I did enjoy reading "The Queue" but I kept thinking as I turned the pages that this is dialogue that would work better on a stage where it can be heard and seen. I think a staged production of this book could be excellent. Ultimately, I think of The Queue as an experiment in form that didn't quite work. However, the writing itself was witty and insightful and did paint a pretty evocative, satiric picture of life in Moscow during what Sorokin (and others) refer to as the period of stagnation. Sorokin's Afterword is a valuable addition to the text and I wonder if it wouldn't serve the reader to be read as a preface rather than an afterword.I do recommend this book even though I think the work itself would be better performed than read. It does require some concentration but there are enough brilliantly written `snippets' to make the experience worthwhile. I think The Queue would be of particular interest to those with an interest in Soviet literature and history since I think they are more likely to `get' many of the asides and self-referential jokes made in the text.L. Fleisig
Reviewer: Mark Down
Rating: 3.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: probably good - certainly unusual and interesting - but the truth is I got bored and stopped.
Reviewer: Dennis Brown
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: This is a challenging book to read but the message is one that opens some insight into the lifestyle of the 20th century commoner in Russia.