• Animals 2739386
  • Book 2929646 1920
  • Book 862492
  • Buckled Book 2180047
  • Narrative 794978
  • Library 425730 2

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

The collection of the author's work titled "Groundhog Times" has been published. – August 8, 2022

Moscow’s “Vremya” Publishing House recently published a collection of the author's work titled "Groundhog Times". Contained are the 2016 novel “Groundhog Times,” as well as two Aldanov Literary Award winning novellas – “Skvorlin’s Tales” (2020), and “The Disenchanted Wanderer”(2021).

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 "The Disenchanted Wanderer" 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.

Writer Mark Uralsky Аbout the Story “The Disenchanted Wanderer”

A fascinating story, written with great skill and taste. I have not come across anything of this quality in all my years of reviewing the Mark Aldanov Literary Prize. I give the highest score!