Absurdistan Reviews
"Starred Review. The result is a sendup of American values abroad and a complex, sympathetic protagonist worthy of comparison to America's enduring literary heroes." - Publishers Weekly
"Who else could tie together nineteenth-century Russian literature, hip-hop, and twenty-first-century oil politics and strife?" - Booklist
"Highly recommended for both public and academic libraries." - Library Journal
"[H]is characters are too grotesque to prompt much sympathy. ... Leaves a very sour aftertaste - but that's probably the point." - Kirkus
"The novel is grounded in a noble literary lineage. You can hear echoes of Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel, with its glorification of size and appetites. Misha is a man of leisure on the order of Goncharov's Oblomov, who spends most of his time in bed. Although it's not written with as much compassion as A Confederacy of Dunces (justifiably so -- do we need to sympathize with the oligarchy?), Absurdistan exhibits a similar sense of humor mixed with sharp insights into the absurdity of the modern world." - The Washington Post
"Compared with most young novelists his age, who tend toward cutesy involution, Shteyngart is a giant mounted on horseback. He ranges more widely, sees more sweepingly and gets where he's going with far more aplomb. His Absurdistan, to Americans, may seem amusingly far away at first, but the longer one spends there, hunkered down with Misha in a hotel room high above the rocket fire, the closer and more recognizable it gets. Absurdsvanï is far, but Absurdistan is near." - The New York Times
"Absurdistan is not just a hilarious novel, but a record of a particular peak in the history of human folly. No one is more capable of dealing with the transition from the hell of socialism to the hell of capitalism in Eastern Europe than Shteyngart, the great-great grandson of one Nikolai Gogol and the funniest foreigner alive." - Aleksandar Hemon
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