Download Super Sad True Love Story: A Novel fb2

by Gary Shteyngart

Humor

Author:

Gary Shteyngart
ISBN:

0812977866
ISBN13:

978-0812977868
Genre:

Humor
Publisher:

Random House Trade Paperbacks; First Print edition (May 3, 2011)
Pages:

334 pages
Subcategory:

Humor
Language:

English
FB2 format

1418 kb
ePUB format

1726 kb
DJVU format

1212 kb
Rating:

4.4
Votes:

531
Formats:

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Others will die around me. They will be nullified.

Others will die around me. Nothing of their personality will remain. The light switch will be turned off. Their lives, their entirety, will be marked by glossy marble headstones bearing false.

Since my last book, Super Sad Something or Other came out eight months ago I have given 249 readings in the . Having read and greatly enjoyed Gary Shteyngart's funny second novel "Absurdistan", I turned to "Super Sad True Love Story" expecting more light wit.

Since my last book, Super Sad Something or Other came out eight months ago I have given 249 readings in the United States and in dangerous foreign countries such as Colombia, Russia and Scotland (I still can’t legally talk about what happened in that Glasgow pub). For the paperback I will give another 249 readings hitting the pasta-paella belt in Southern Europe, but also venturing into unheard-of smaller cities in America, such as Tempeh, which I’m pretty sure is a kind of vegan food as well as a small metropolis.

Super Sad True Love Story is the third novel by American writer Gary Shteyngart. The novel takes place in a near-future dystopian New York where life is dominated by media and retail.

Gary Shteyngart’s wonderful new novel, Super Sad True Love Story, is a supersad, superfunny, superaffecting performance - a book that not only showcases the ebullient satiric gifts he demonstrated in his entertaining 2002 debut, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, but that also uncovers his abilities to write deeply and movingly about love and loss and mortality.

Start by marking Super Sad True Love Story as Want to Read . Gary Shteyngart has failed me. True, he probably wasn't aware that he had a responsibility to me, personally, but (in most cultures).

Start by marking Super Sad True Love Story as Want to Read: Want to Read savin. ant to Read. Wildly funny, rich, and humane, Super Sad True Love Story is a knockout novel by a young master, a book in which falling in love just may redeem a planet falling apart. True, he probably wasn't aware that he had a responsibility to me, personally, but (in most cultures) ignorance of the law is seldom sufficient cause to dismiss the crime. Shteyngart's crime is that he has written what appears to be an awful book. I say 'what appears to be' because I didn't have the heart to finish it. )

Gary Shteyngart is the New York Times bestselling author of the memoir Little Failure (a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist) and the novels Super Sad True Love Story (winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize), Absurdistan, and The Russian Debutante’s Handbook (winner.

Gary Shteyngart's dystopian novel narrates two doomed romances: one between a man and a woman, and . By turns fierce, funny and frightening, Super Sad True Love Story deserves a place on the shelf beside 1984 and Brave New World

Gary Shteyngart's dystopian novel narrates two doomed romances: one between a man and a woman, and one between a writer and his country - or what he fears his country may become. By turns fierce, funny and frightening, Super Sad True Love Story deserves a place on the shelf beside 1984 and Brave New World. Super Sad' And Satiric, Two Stories Of Doomed Love.

Gary Shteyngart’s wonderful new novel, Super Sad True Love Story, is a supersad, superfunny, superaffecting performance - a book that not only showcases the ebullient satiric gift. ut that also uncovers his abilities to write deeply and movingly about love and loss and mortality. It’s a novel that gives us a cutting comic portrait of a futuristic America, nearly ungovernable and perched on the abyss of fiscal collapse, and at the same time it is a novel that chronicles a sweetly real love affair as it blossoms from its awkward, improbable beginnings.

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK SELECTED ONE OF 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY MICHIKO KAKUTANI, THE NEW YORK TIMES NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post • The Boston Globe • San Francisco Chronicle • The Seattle Times • O: The Oprah Magazine • Maureen Corrigan, NPR • Salon • Slate • Minneapolis Star Tribune • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • The Kansas City Star • Charlotte Observer • The Globe and Mail • Vancouver Sun • Montreal Gazette • Kirkus ReviewsIn the near future, America is crushed by a financial crisis and our patient Chinese creditors may just be ready to foreclose on the whole mess. Then Lenny Abramov, son of an Russian immigrant janitor and ardent fan of “printed, bound media artifacts” (aka books), meets Eunice Park, an impossibly cute Korean American woman with a major in Images and a minor in Assertiveness. Could falling in love redeem a planet falling apart?

Walan

Paints a terrifying picture of the future; where technology is king and privacy doesn't exist. Well written and completely believable. I can't walk past someone texting and walking without thinking of think book and the implications of allowing technology to rule your life. Read this, it will change the way you look at social media (especially the 'story' function of Snap, Insta and FB), how you perceive privacy, and what you're willing to put on the internet.

Anarus

Few of the reviews here refer to Shteyngart's other novels, and perhaps that's telling. The resemblances between "Absurdistan" and this satire--the unattractive protragonist and his love interest in the foreground, dystopic corporate empire in the background--are too obvious to miss, and therein perhaps the shortcomings here. When a novel is less than wonderful, even an amateur wants to play doctor, and perhaps the problem I can identify is that Shteyngart's favored scenario became a little too formulaic on the second go-round. Or perhaps I was charmed the first time, a little less disarmed the second, or had unconsciously raised my expectations. Or perhaps it's the times? 2010 seems decades beyond 2006; we are in the midst of a world-wide recession and beset with a bought-and-paid-for government that obsesses on serving the rich. It's hard to laugh, or to be induced to laugh, at anything that isn't totally off the wall.

The dystopia of "Super Sad" is hardly much of a leap from where we are now. I scoured reviews of the book, looking for someone who could nail the problem for me, and came upon this paragraph from Ron Charles of the Washington Post:

"Perhaps the saddest aspect of this "Super Sad True Love Story" is that you can smell Shteyngart sweating to stay one step ahead of the decaying world he's trying to satirize. It's an almost impossible race now that the exhibitionism of ordinary people has lost its ability to shock us. Just try coming up with something creepier than middle school girls wearing shorts with the word "Juicy" across their bottoms, or imagine a fashion line cruder than FCUK (Shteyngart comes close). His description of friends getting together after work to text other friends is taking place today in every D.C. restaurant. And how can you parody the TV news coverage when George Stephanopoulos has already presented a straight-faced report on Lindsay Lohan's obscene fingernail stencil?"

Another personal diagnosis is that the novel suffers from overambition. Shteyngart's satiric world clatters and clanks with inventions that constantly make us exporers of a world we should inhabit along with his characters, but he never quite succeeds in creating an environment for them--we remain tourists while he necessarily feels obliged to describe the sights. To get us to inhabit the landscape, to make it real to us, perhaps the novel should have been twice as long; but if that is what was necessary, so be it. A mere sketch of an alien landscape, even one not much more than an exaggeration of our own, is frustrating: I wanted to feel the ambience, be haunted. But it wasn't real, even granting the fact that I live in New York and am familiar with the book's described geography.

Moreover, the mix of humor and disaster didn't work for me. Lenny's friends are murdered, the disenfranchised get machine-gunned or clubbed on the head, and yet we are supposed to laugh in the next scene. A tall order, one I don't think Shteyngart pulls off. With a consistency of satiric tone--if the deaths themselves had been outlandish?-- it might have worked, but I didn't find that consistency.

It could be that Steyngart's clown face is forced and stems from undermediated psychic needs. Lenny's "diary" entries in the novel have a literary power that the rest of the novel lacks, perhaps because Lenny, the source of the humor, is himself quite serious. Maybe this is a Shteyngart voice that will find a satisfying outlet later.

On balance this was an interesting book, and worth the time; but I finished it thinking it might have been (choose one) more powerful, more devastating an indictment, or more moving, or certainly funnier. But as a tossed salad, at least this time, the flavors competed rather than complemented.

Kefym

SSTLS is written as diary entries, text messages, and emails amongst the main characters. The setting of the novel is an America that is falling apart due to a lack of a sustainable economic system. The love story moves along through the violent collapse.

The author does a very good job of establishing believable characters, each of which is different from each other and none of which are perfect or archetypes. These are real people with realistic problems and flaws, and you care about them all. The slightly-in-the-future America the author paints seems over the top, but when considered, is simply a potential progression from where we are now. For example: today, young girls wear clothes that are more revealing that in the past: sheer cocktail dresses and backless shirts. In the book, young girls wear pants that are actually transparent. It strikes us as ridiculous, but if we follow the trajectory of more and more revealing clothing, we end up with see through clothing. This is just one of many projections the author makes that seem shocking but could potentially be realistic.

Overall the author shows great insight into where America might be headed, and what kinds of responses we might see from different segments of the population. He cleverly enfolds these predictions in a first person love story. This blurs the line between a politico-fiction, which might be dry, and a romance, which adds interest and flavour.

I enjoyed the dashes of 1984ishness and the wry commentary on contemporary culture. The story was plodding at times; the pacing is what brought it down from a 5 to a 4. Definitely worth reading though.

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