About
Having read the 300-page novel in one sitting, I fell into a stupor, as if I'd just finished watching something along the lines of Kubrick's The Shining. After awhile, associations began to suggest themselves: Kafka's The Castle and the steel-carcass labyrinth of Robbe-Grillet's novels, but without their existential overload, abbreviated to a slick thriller in the tradition of Roman Polanski and David Fincher. Undoubtfully Grjonko’s "The Building" is a genre literature, a superb horror novel. Yet if you abstract for a moment from the gripping plot, you reach another dimension and – strange as it may be - you no longer realize the genre limits and return into the reality of Kafka and Robbe-Grillet. Or rather into a very similar reality, but still different one – as if it existed on the same floor in one building. Downstairs Gustav Meirink, Leo Peruc and Edgar Poe live. And William Berrows occupies the basement.
Knizhnaya Vitrina (Book Review), Novosibirsk, Russia
News
First Prize in Mark Aldanov Literary Award Contest, Again. – September 7, 2021
Vladimir Grjonko became a winner of New York Mark Aldanov Literary Award 2021 for the second time after winning the previous year award. His Disenchanted Wanderer won the first prize in the contest and was published by "The New Review" Literary Magazine.
First Prize in Mark Aldanov Literary Award 2020 Contest. – August 26, 2020
Vladimir Grjonko became a winner of New York Mark Aldanov Literary Award 2020. His Skvorlin's Tales won the first prize in the contest and was published by "The New Review" Literary Magazine.
Reviews
Editor-in-Chief of The New Review Magazine, Marina Adamovich, on Vladimir Grjonko's prose
Vladimir Grjonko's prose is style. He can afford to imitate the style of Mr. Belkin - ironically seeing in his uncomplicated stories the fate of a small man of the great Soviet era ("Skvorlin's Tales") or illustrating Dostoevsky's bombers' conspiracy theory (“Disenchanted Wanderer”) in the night skylines of Heidelberg. Time in his work swings like a giant Foucauldian pendulum, and thus the heroes can simultaneously exist in the prehistory of Israel, in revolutionary Baku, and in the space of New York pierced by skyscrapers (“Groundhog Time”). The style of a spiral going to infinity - each turn of which is well known and at the same time frighteningly unpredictable.