Archive for April, 2011

Vladimir Sorokin’s Day of the Oprichnik, which Farrar, Straus and Giroux published in March, takes place in 2028, but it’s deeply indebted to—indeed, deeply enmeshed in—the past. Sorokin, whose knowledge of Russian literature and history is encyclopedic (without any of the stuffiness that such a word might suggest), has written a book haunted by the reign of Ivan the Terrible. Yet Oprichnik (a term for Ivan the Terrible’s most feared courtiers) also suggests that the violence, cruelty, and human degradation that characterized that regime have recurred throughout the country’s dark history. And very little has changed. In a glowing review of the book in The New York Times Book Review, Stephen Kotkin wrote:

So it is in Putin’s Russia, where a gang of police officials, the siloviki, lord over not just the richest private citizens but also other parts of the state. Sorokin’s imaginative diagnosis of Putinism further grasps that the officials’ looting is driven not by profiteering alone, but by their conviction that they are defending Russian interests. Everything Sorokin’s oprichniks do is a transaction, but their love of country runs deep. They may give in to temptation and tune in to foreign radio (“enemy voices”), but these moments of weakness vitiate neither their pride in their work nor their code of honor. They have ideals.

Day of the Oprichnik is a satire and a polemic and a picaresque and a tragedy, but it’s also, as Kotkin notes, a brilliant analysis of a society in crisis—perhaps perpetually in crisis. Below, in an exclusive essay, Sorokin explores the roots of his remarkable diagnosis.

-Mark Krotov, Assistant Editor

Ideally, prose isn’t written—it simply happens.

Luckily, that’s exactly what occurred in the case of Day of the Oprichnik. The desire to find the literary equivalent of a chemical formula—one that would explain the servants of Russia’s authoritative absolutism—had been brewing for a long time, but any subject is connected, somehow or other, with style and with tone, which plays an important part in this formula. Write Lolita in the language of Goncharov or Faulkner, and it’ll be a rather predictable book. Each regime has its own style. Each hangman has his own unique humor, with which he justifies his actions and cheers himself up. It’s well-known that Ivan the Terrible often laughed hysterically as he gazed upon the suffering of the boyars he was torturing. It’s not hard to guess that out of respect for the tsar, the entourage present at the executions also roared with laughter. And so the people gathered on the square laughed, too. In the history of our country, where the government’s violence against individuality has always carried an inevitable character, laughter has concealed and hidden much. But laughter has also saved many.

I wanted to tell the story of a monstrous government’s servant in the language of the laughing marketplace.
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We invite you to join our second national teleforum, this time with John D. Kasarda, co-author of Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next. The live event takes place Friday, April 15th, at 2:00PM EST / 11:00AM PST; participation is free.

As you may remember from our Justice teleforum in November, this is a new format for authors and readers to dive deeper into the book. Unlike a webinar, you don’t have to be tied to a computer to join—a phone is all you need.

Pico Iyer in Time recently called Kasarda’s aerotropolis one of “10 ideas that will change the world.” So, what is the aerotropolis?

In the 20th century, airports were built outside of cities, and roads connected one to the other. This pattern—city in the center, airport on the periphery—has shaped life across the globe.

Today however, jet travel, round-the-clock workdays, overnight shipping, and global business networks have turned the pattern inside out. A new urban form, the “aerotropolis,” has emerged, placing airports in the center with cities growing around them, connecting workers, suppliers, executives, and goods to the global marketplace. The aerotropolis model is re-shaping life in China and India, Seoul and Amsterdam, Dallas and Memphis, and it could be the economic answer for a city like Detroit.

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Solar System for iPad is one of the few unqualified successes in the nascent, hybrid area of books-as-apps (or is it enhanced ebooks? New media texts?). Author Marcus Chown graciously and candidly answered a few questions about how such a unique property came about. Chown is cosmology consultant of New Scientist. His books include We Need To Talk About Kelvin, shortlisted for the 2010 Royal Society Book Prize. In the US, the book is published by FSG as The Matchbox That Ate a Forty-Ton Truck.

-Ryan Chapman

Chapman: How did the app come about?

Marcus Chown: My editor at Faber—a UK publisher with strong connection with FSG, incidentally—said: “Would you be interested in doing an iPad app based on one of your popular science books?” It was early 2010. The iPad had yet to be launched but there was “buzz” surrounding Apple’s device. I had never had an illustrated version of one of my books such as Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You (The Quantum Zoo in the US) so was keen to do one. It therefore me took less than ten seconds to say to Henry, as coolly as I could: “Yes, I’m interested.”

A few weeks’ later Henry phoned to say, by Googling, he had found a company called Touchpress, which had expertise in developing iPad apps. Touchpress was founded by Max Whitby, a former producer of Nova/Horizon; his friend from Oxford University days, Stephen Wolfram, multimillionaire creator of the computer language “Mathematica”; and American science writer Theo Gray. Gray had written the text for a stunningly beautiful, glossy book on the chemical elements called, unsurprisingly, The Elements.

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There’s a passage in Don DeLillo’s Americana where he describes walking down a busy sidewalk among a throng of New Yorkers. He captured this feeling with such perfect articulation that now I think about the sentences every time I pass through Times Square.

Thanks to Broadcastr, anyone can experience this sensation in real-time. Visiting Rockefeller Center? Use the Broadcastr app to hear Joey Berglund’s impressions from Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom.

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