3.0
Red Pyramid
ByPublisher Description
Extended comic turns like The Queue and relentless, mind-bending, genre-shredding extravaganzas like Ice Trilogy have established Vladimir Sorokin as a master of the contemporary novel. It is to Sorokin’s short fiction, however, that readers must turn to encounter the wildest and most unsettling of his inventions and provocations. Sorokin is a virtuoso of parody and pastiche, as well as a poet of the black sites where the human soul stands exposed to its own incontinent desires, and Red Pyramid spans the whole of his career, from his emergence in the Soviet Union as a member of Moscow’s artistic underground to his late preeminence as an observer and interpreter of the Putin era, with its squalid parade of gruesome folly and unhinged violence. Included here are queasy tour-de-forces, like the early “Obelisk,” a story as scatological as it is conceptual; the notorious “A Month in Dachau,” which earned Sorokin his sobriquet as the Russian Sade; and profoundly unsettling texts like “Tiny Tim,” where tenderness is inseparable from horror.
Sorokin’s stories have appeared in The New Yorker, n+1, Harper’s Magazine, and The Baffler. This is the first time they have been collected in English.
Sorokin’s stories have appeared in The New Yorker, n+1, Harper’s Magazine, and The Baffler. This is the first time they have been collected in English.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesRed Pyramid Reviews
3.0
“picked this up from the library, only because it was one of the first nyrb books i could find. was not expecting too much because the only russian literature i’ve read is dostoyevsky, however this was the most bizarre and truly uncomfortable i’ve been with a short story collection. some stories were absolute bangers, such as nastya, but most fell flat and were lost within the obsession with bodily fluids and violence. be-ware!”
Diverse representationFormulaicLimited character growthMemorableMorally ambiguousUnlikableTwistyUnpredictableGrittyHarshHistoricalSetting fits the storyFlowery/lushFunnyTakes getting used toAbuseAnimal abuseChild abuseDeathDomestic violenceExplicit sexual contentMisogynyMurderReligious intoleranceSelf-harmSexual assaultSubstance abuseViolence
“My first thought as I sit down to write this consisted of the following:
The red roar calls us into the pyramid, and calls us beyond the burdens of the limits of our humanity. Beyond the sanity that is transcribed into our soul and above the altered state of alienation. Look deeper…
Sorokin’s collapsed consciousness is on another level than I have ever read. His writing possesses an essence of anticipation of which I was constantly in awe. Each story did not land perfectly in my mind, though that comes with the art of the short story—there were definitely some misses along with the hits. However, the hits were bullseyes for me.
So many of these did a fantastic job of scratching the itch of societal criticism (Russia’s and the world’s) which devolves slowly (sometimes quickly) into language and ideas that are both unhinged and nauseating. Sorokin comes unglued from reality BUT his tone is often nonchalant about the voracity (literal and figurative) of humanity, which holds a mirror up to us all, again: not just in Russia. The situations the characters in these stories find themselves constitute a reality many of us choose not to see, and fortunately we have someone like him in modern times, provocative enough to light up the darkness and simultaneously dim the brightness that overloads and clouds our vision.
The writing style is not as poetic as what I normally find beautiful but his style is beautiful in its own way, and there are quotes and sentences peppered through that made me stop and think. One in particular:
:: “We all live in the not yet, only the dead don’t live in the not yet. Or angels. Instead of not yet, they have eternity. Ewigkeit. And we have la dolce vita. That’s how we differ from them.” ::
I do not want to spoil anything…so: standout stories for me were “Nastya” (my favorite), “A Month in Dachau”, “White Square”, “Red Pyramid”, “Violet Swans”, and “Hiroshima”. Yes I am picking a lot but so many have merit in such different ways.
Max Lawton’s note at the end states that Sorokin wrote “Hiroshima” “outside of time,” and I loved how he presents Sorokin as almost deific and the image of the “interstellar void,” or the world that tells him he is finished and to stop writing, for humanity’s control is too powerful and his words will be misunderstood, mislaid bricks in the literature of the world.
I agree with Lawton in his final sentence—”THIS IS NOT THE END”—Sorokin is a force to be reckoned with, even against the void that tells him no.
I hate rating short story collections, but…4.5/5⭐”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, was published by the famed émigré 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 Blue Lard 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. His most recent novel is Inheritance. He lives in Berlin.
Max Lawton is a novelist, musician, and translator. He has translated several works by Vladimir Sorokin, including the NYRB Classics edition of Telluria. He lives in Los Angeles.
Will Self is a journalist, columnist, and author of more than two dozen books of fiction and nonfiction, including eleven novels. His most recent book is the collection Why Read: Selected Writings 2001-2021. He lives in the UK.
Max Lawton is a novelist, musician, and translator. He has translated several works by Vladimir Sorokin, including the NYRB Classics edition of Telluria. He lives in Los Angeles.
Will Self is a journalist, columnist, and author of more than two dozen books of fiction and nonfiction, including eleven novels. His most recent book is the collection Why Read: Selected Writings 2001-2021. He lives in the UK.
Other books by Vladimir Sorokin
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