Telluria
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4.3 • 4 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
In the warring, neo-feudal society of this cross-genre novel for fans of Cormac McCarthy and William Gibson, the greatest treasure is a dose of tellurium—a magical drug administered by a spike through the brain.
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sorokin (Day of the Oprichnik) unfurls a hypnotic and hallucinatory piece of speculative fiction in which most of Russia and Europe have been shattered into fractious, feudal principalities in the wake of an apocalyptic near-future war between Christendom and fundamentalist Islam. With advanced technology and gasoline in the hands of a powerful few, much of society has returned to hardscrabble, premodern lives. Their one escape is tellurium, a powerful narcotic delivered by hammering—often fatally—a nail of rare metals directly into the brain. It's a big concept, and Sorokin opts to convey it through many characters in 50 loosely related vignettes featuring royalty and rebels, peasants and soldiers, animal-headed "zoomorphs," diminutive and gigantic "littluns" and "biguns," and, of course, desperate tellurium addicts and the "carpenters" who administer the nails. As Sorokin puts it, the continent has been "plunged back into the blessed and enlightened Middle Ages... the world returned to human scale." The author more than makes up for a slightly diffuse structure with his breathtaking imaginative leaps and wicked humor, which he conveys in dialogue between those who desperately want the tellurium and those who have it. Again, Sorokin succeeds at dragging the reader into a dark and scary place.
