ABAW: Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart

Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart

While thinking about what I might say about this book, I watched the book trailer and listened to Gary Shteyngart’s interview on Studio 360. Both the trailer and interview are on the Studio 360 site for the episode. Go watch and listen. They’ll take you about ten minutes. I’ll wait.

In both venues, Shteyngart uses hyperbolic absurdity to get attention for the book, which is appropriate, since the book is full of hyperbolic absurdity. What that excess of noise belies is the very scary world that Shteyngart illustrates. A very scary world that is already happening.

Super Sad True Love Story is a plausible and damning projection of our current social and economic trajectory.

This is a dystopian novel set in the near future, perhaps within the next few decades (“next Tuesday” quips Shteyngart to Kurt Anderson). Social media rules the world. Everyone is tethered to an äppärät, a social media device that facilitates virtually (and virtually facilitates) all interaction between people (with the exception of the revolutionaries and the most powerful man in the book). Everyone is obsessed with youth, money, and sex. Not necessarily in that order. When a person enters the room, they are immediately judged by everyone else in the room on their fuckability index. Their credit ratings and net worth are displayed for everyone to see. Nothing seems particularly private. No one talks TO anyone (unless they are ‘verballing,’ a seemingly rare action and one of the many very sharp slang terms Shteyngart deploys in this world). No one really listens to anyone. Books (aka bound printed matter) are considered gross by most people, mainly because they smell, but also because they require effort.

The invasion of Venezula has gone poorly. The United States economy is collapsing. The National Guard has been pirated by private corporations. But the main characters aren’t particularly concerned about any of that until it starts boiling up in their apartment.

Lenny is the child of Russian immigrants. In his late thirties he is by modern standards old and decaying. Unlike most people, Lenny actually likes books. And he has a lot of them. A whole bookshelf in his living room. They are his treasured possessions.  He works for a company that helps people live forever. He feels a little disconnected from youth culture, both because of his age and because of his eleven months partying in Italy, but now he has a new reason to want to live forever. He’s met Eunny.

Eunny is in her early twenties. The child of Korean immigrants.  She is perfect, young, androgynous, obsessed with spending money. She and her mother and sister have suffered abuse from her father, a podiatrist who supports the status-obsessed lifestyle of his family.  Eunny initially thinks Lenny is gross, but out of convenience and a sense that Lenny treats her differently than other people (a disconcerting feeling that she fails to describe in words), Eunny ends up moving into Lenny’s New York apartment when they both return to the U.S. from Italy.

Lenny and Eunny are in love. Or what approximates love in this novel.

The triangle in this love story is completed by Joshie, Lenny’s old friend, mentor, boss and all around powerful dude. Joshie subscribes to all the treatments of their company, not just those that prevent aging, but also those that restore youth. He also, very notably, does not use an äppärät (though he does ‘teen,’ the word for electronic communication, with Eunny after he too becomes obsessed with her perfection). Joshie never seems to be in physical danger, and seems to have some control over the National Guard, though his role in the politics of the situation are never made clear.  The only other characters in the story who do not use äppäräti are dissidents.

Lenny’s ineptitude and naivete, Eunny’s shallowness, the absurd way that people talk to one another, the bizarre culture and economics of the story and its shocking reality distance the reader from the horrors perpetuated continually throughout the text. The characters themselves don’t seem to notice the violent private-military takeover of the United States because they’re all too busy staring into their äppäräti.  Only when people die and the äppäräti stop working (temporarily) do the characters begin to notice and to display humanity.

I can’t figure out exactly where the love is in this love story. Absurdist tragedy seems more appropriate. For instance, as the country is falling apart, we figure out that Lenny can’t really read his books. He is capable of reading, but the complexity of the stories turns out to be too much for him to contemplate. The books are just one more kind of status object for him, as he seems incapable of the complex thinking required to read and understand a book.

I sound like I hated this book.  I’m sure I’m making it sound terribly depressing. Don’t get me wrong. This is a smart and funny and scary book, and I really enjoyed it. In his interview with Kurt Anderson, Shteyngart claims to have had to revise the story to match the changes that were actually happening in society. With financial collapse and social media explosion, he had to escalate his hyperbole to outpace reality.  Consider that the next time you update your Facebook status or shop at Victoria’s Secret or read one of my blog posts.

Here are some questions I have as I consider the book:

-What happens when everything about us is public? What is the role of performance?

-As the story unfolds we realize that we’re reading a set of found texts that have been edited into Lenny and Eunny’s love story. How does one accidentally find electronic texts? Dave recently wondered about where off-the-record chat transcripts go. We could also ask what happens to our emails and Facebook stati.  What happens to the storage of Google or of Facebook if those companies cease to exist? Who owns that data? What do they do with it? Are they bound to honor Terms of Use Agreements from the defunct companies? What if they’re unethical? What if they are a foreign government?  Does that data tell a story? A love story? A tragic epic?

-What is so important about Italy and how do we understand the Super Sad ending of the story for Lenny?

-What does the book mean, the physical object, in this society?

-What is the role of smell in the culture of this novel (or in our culture)?

-How exactly do those Total Surrender panties work?

ABAW Giveaway: Bad Mother

I have an extra copy of Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace by Ayelet Waldman. I read this book last year and wrote about it here. Waldman is bravely honest, brash, funny, and heartbreaking, sometimes all at once.

Waldman sent me this book in a twitter contest last year. I want to pass it along. I want to give this book to someone else now, maybe even to YOU.

Drop me a comment below if you think I should send it to you. You don’t have to be a GOOD mother or a BAD mother. You don’t even have to be a mother at all.  Just tell me you’d like to read the book, and I’ll choose a winner at random.  

One entry per person.  Begging and flattery are fine, but they won’t make the result any less random.  

I’ll take entries from now until midnight on January 31, 2011.

Eglentyne's 2010 Literary Awards

Another post about all the stuff I read last year, because when I read 73 books, I want to milk it for all it’s worth.

Drawing from those books I finished in 2010 here are my completely subjective and non-scientific award choices. Yes, there are multiple winners in some categories. I can do that because they are MY completely subjective and unscientific awards. If you disagree, post a note in the comment or get your own list.

Better Together

To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee and Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya

Read them Aloud, Twice (Or listen to the author read them, or just read them to yourself. No matter what, these are awesome with kids.)

Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie, Odd and the Frost Giants by Neil Gaiman, The Magician’s Elephant by Kate DiCamillo (OH! to write such prose!), and When Santa Fell to Earth by Cornelia Funke

Best Real, Live, Honest-to-goodness Humans (aka Non-Fiction)

Bad Mother by Ayelet Waldman and Tinsel by Hank Stuever

Best Illustration of a How a Story Can be Born

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Philip Pullman

Most Likely to Make Me Pull Out My Hair Wondering Why I’m Still Reading It (as I turn it upside down for the fourth time)

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

Best Step-On-Your-Face-If-You’re-a-Sadistic-Pig, Butt-kicking, theorem-solving Character

Lisbeth Salander from the Millennium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson

Still Crazy After All These Years

Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton 

My Dear Watson

The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Best Supernatural Reboot

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith (no relation)

Stunningly Good Writing for any Readers, but tagged as Young Adult

The Book Thief by Markus Zuzak and When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead

Best Short-Story Collection

After the Quake by Haruki Murakami

Best Use of Mathematics to Illustrate the Poignancy of Human Relationships

The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa

Most Likely to Make Me Wish I Could Write Like That

The Book Thief by Markus Zuzak, Juliet Naked by Nick Hornby, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, Tinkers by Paul Hardin, and…

My Very Favorite Book I Read Last Year, as well as The One that Made Me Flat-Out Bawl for Twenty Minutes

One Day by David Nicholls

What Will 2011 Bring? Stay tuned… 

ABAW December Edition

On our trip to New Mexico, we upheld our Christmas tradition of reading Cornelia Funke’s When Santa Fell to Earth by listening to the audiobook version, beautifully read by Funke herself. I’ve commented about this book before. I can attest that the book becomes more magical and poignant for me each time we read it. 

The other book I finished in December was also a Christmas story.

Tinsel: A Search for America’s Christmas Present by Hank Stuever.  

This is not a book I would have picked up on my own, but my friend Vicki gave it to me and I couldn’t resist her recommendation. I started reading it in New Mexico, with Christmas lights blinking over my head, football games flashing on the tv, and the people I love most in the world gathered nearby. 

Stuever, a pop-culture writer for the Washington Post, spent three Christmases observing Frisco, Texas, trying to find some understanding of the cultural phenomenon of Christmas in the United States. He finds both excess and sincerity, waste and love, confusion and certainty in the ways in which the people of Frisco celebrate Christmas. Stuever was embedded with several families in Frisco. He gets to know them by watching them wrap and unwrap, by helping them decorate, by talking with them, and hanging out with them at parties and in quiet moments and while they shop.  He looks, as it were, under the wrapping paper to see what lurks there.  He finds a big idea of Christmas in Frisco, but he also finds something personal, an understanding of his own Christmas artifacts and rituals, an understanding of where the Christmas love in his life could be found. 

The timing of Stuever’s project also allowed him to observe the top of the economic bubble in 2006, and the harsh economic decline that followed for Frisco, like other American cities, over the next two years. 

This book is sharply observant, witty and touching without becoming overly sentimental. There is a kind of beauty in the excess of Christmas and there is a kind of ugliness, though no one likes to look directly at that for too long. Stuever very cleverly hits Christmas from almost every angle you can imagine: examining theology, history, economy, geopolitics, psychology, sociology, electricity, and more, even connecting aspects of Christmas to a sense of manifest destiny and and civil engineering.  He engages all of these aspects in accessible ways, helping us to know and understand, and perhaps to love, the families he writes about.  His subtle conclusion—alluded to in the subtitle, but never directly restated in the text—seems to be about the importance of presence. But don’t believe for one second that his conclusion is cliche, or that this is a tale of personal epiphany, or that Stuever ever abandons his pointed skepticism.

I did not know Stuever’s writing before this, but I seek him out in the Post now and you should too.

A Book A Week 2010 Retrospective

According to my tabulations I read 73 books last year. That number is staggering to me. That’s more books than I’ve read for the past several years with small children (welcome back, adult intellectual activity). You can check here for the month-by-month list, including links to comments I made about the books (if I made any on the blog). 

I chose the books on the list as I went, abandoning some, returning to a few later, in a rather haphazard fashion. I read at a much greater rate earlier in the year than I did later in the year. During the summer I swallowed up books with little effort. From September forward I had to push myself to finish every book. I attribute the difference to LIFE factors rather than to the quality of the books I was reading. 

In 2011 I have A PLAN. I know, always dangerous, setting myself up for failure, yes, yes. I have already chosen most of the books I want to read according to a few basic criteria. I want to read a lot. 

Each month I will read 1) a notable/classic book that I have not read, 2) a book I’ve read before, 3) something published in the past two years, alternating fiction and non-fiction, and 4) a recommended book, alternating between suggestions from trusted readers and from the ALA banned/challenged book list. A fifth, unlisted category exists as well, those books that I read out loud to the Sonars. I’ll include these books in my discussion as the year goes along.  Right now we’re reading The Goblet of Fire.

I’ve filled in a chart on my wall with book titles, leaving some spaces for new books and for recommendations. I will almost certainly make substitutions along the way.  I’m open for recommendations from YOU, by the way. Hit me in the comments with books you’ve loved.

Here’s what I’ve planned for 1Q 2011:

January

Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart, and Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld

February

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hossein, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi (yep, still need to finish this one), and The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier

March

Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, [Recent Fiction, which I will choose spontaneously at the library], and Luka and the Fire of Life by Salman Rushdie

What are you reading?