PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksIn the novel, Sorokin’s retro-futuristic projection of Russia has turned away from \'the collective West,\' crumbling into a number of sovereign republics...The fragmentation of the fictional Russian state is accompanied by a parallel atomization of literary form...The novel unfolds in 50 chapters, each written from a completely new perspective, in a completely different style...The result is a high-concept feat of world-building that captures a capacious sociological portrait of Sorokin’s brave new world — integrating snapshots from the lives of everyone, from paupers to presidents...This narrative fragmentation contains a profound political and philosophical dimension...A decade ago, when the novel was being written, Sorokin sensed something was amiss with Europe’s quasi-utopian vision of a globalized world...In those days, when hopeful Fukuyamists still roamed the earth, Telluria emerged as a contrary vision, positing a future of regressing democracies, splintering states, and failed ideological symbiosis in the international marketplace of ideas...In Telluria, all the conflicts of the past are recapitulated in the future: the East goes to great lengths to isolate itself from Western liberalism, denizens of the sovereign republics organize revolutions to reestablish communism, and the same old bad blood between the Christian and Islamic worlds reignites a new wave of crusades...History is revealed to be a cycle of vicious recurrences with no utopian end in sight.
