(np) Palast on Putin

[rich]

waiting for this one. Sorokin's earlier book Day of the Oprichnik is
scarily prescient considering the present day

rich

https://www.amazon.com/Telluria-Vladimir-Sorokin/dp/1681376334/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1648348947&sr=1-3

*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,



On Sat, Mar 26, 2022 at 6:32 PM Mark Thibodeau <jerkyleboeuf at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Yes, it's true,  Solzhenitsyn WAS more than a bit of an asshole.
>
> And not that great a writer, either. Ever tried to slog your way through
> the Gulag Archipelago? Yikes.
>
> I recommend picking up Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. instead. A far
> superior and more relevant work when it comes to the mysteries, both macro
> and micro, of the human heart.
>
> Jerky
>
>
>
> On Sat, Mar 26, 2022 at 5:15 PM jody2.718 via Pynchon-l <
> pynchon-l at waste.org>
> wrote:
>
> > Larry Summers- I'd half forgotten about that clown. What a disaster,
> along
> > with the rest of the geniuses at Harvard, like Andrei Schleifer, who were
> > going to "fix" Russia with "Shock Therapy," and ended up creating a
> feeding
> > trough for the Oligarchs, and maybe themselves. But Pinochet was only a
> > more recent model for Putin. From an historical perspective, Putin is
> more
> > of what Solzhenitsyn was hoping for- a Tsar-like figure in concert with
> the
> > Orthodox Church that would restore morality and order, as opposed to the
> > decadence of the West, which, in his mind, was destroying Russia at that
> > time. In fact, Solzhenitsyn, who passed in 2008, welcomed Putin.
> > Solzhenitsyn also could not conceive of Ukraine being anything other
> than a
> > part of Russia. Autocratic?- no problem, deeply ingrained in the Russian
> > psyche.
> >
> > Right wing fascism has deep historical roots in Russia. No way was it
> > going to be transformed into some Harvard version of western capitalism
> by
> > "Shock Therapy". Palast is right on.
> >
> >
> >
> _____________________________________________________________________________________________
> >
> > "Vladimir Putin did not arrive from outer space on an abalone
> > shell........."
> > --
> > Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
> >
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>