Super Sad True Love Story: Summary and book reviews of Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart, plus links to an excerpt from Super Sad True Love Story and a biography of Gary Shteyngart.
Super Sad True Love Story A Novel
by Gary Shteyngart
Hardcover: Jul 2010,
352 pages.
Paperback: Jul 2010,
352 pages.
In a very near future—oh, let’s say next Tuesday—a functionally illiterate America is about to collapse. But don’t that tell that to poor Lenny Abramov, the thirty-nine-year-old son of an angry Russian immigrant janitor, proud author of what may well be the world’s last diary, and less-proud owner of a bald spot shaped like the great state of Ohio. Despite his job at an outfit called Post-Human Services, which attempts to provide immortality for its super-rich clientele, death is clearly stalking this cholesterol-rich morsel of a man. And why shouldn’t it? Lenny’s from a different century—he totally loves books (or “printed, bound media artifacts,” as they’re now known), even though most of his peers find them smelly and annoying. But even more than books, Lenny loves Eunice Park, an impossibly cute and impossibly cruel twenty-four-year-old Korean American woman who just graduated from Elderbird College with a major in Images and a minor in Assertiveness.
After meeting Lenny on an extended Roman holiday, blistering Eunice puts that Assertiveness minor to work, teaching our “ancient dork” effective new ways to brush his teeth and making him buy a cottony nonflammable wardrobe. But America proves less flame-resistant than Lenny’s new threads. The country is crushed by a credit crisis, riots break out in New York’s Central Park, the city’s streets are lined with National Guard tanks on every corner, the dollar is so over, and our patient Chinese creditors may just be ready to foreclose on the whole mess. Undeterred, Lenny vows to love both Eunice and his homeland. He’s going to convince his fickle new love that in a time without standards or stability, in a world where single people can determine a dating prospect’s “hotness” and “sustainability” with the click of a button, in a society where the privileged may live forever but the unfortunate will die all too soon, there is still value in being a real human being.
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.
Forget suspense thrillers and horror novels. Forget zombies and vampires and things that go bump in the night. If you are passionate about books and reading, if you value real work, if you love America, Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story just might be the scariest book you read this year. What's most frightening - and, yes, saddest - about Shteyngart's satirical third novel is just how plausible the whole thing is... [I]n the end, Shteyngart's novel is about love - of places, for words, for parents and children and lovers and friends. Such love might not stop the seemingly relentless rush toward destruction or at least absurdity, but it might slow it down just long enough for us to find someone's hand to hold as we sweep, together, into an uncertain future. (Reviewed by Norah Piehl).
Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. A rich commentary on the obsessions and catastrophes of the information age and a heartbreaker worthy of its title, this is Shteyngart's best yet.
Kirkus Reviews
Starred Review. This cyber-apocalyptic vision of an American future seems eerily like the present, in a bleak comedy that is even more frightening than funny.
Booklist
Starred Review. Full-tilt and fulminating satirist Shteyngart is mordant, gleeful, and embracive as he funnels today’s follies and atrocities into a devilishly hilarious, soul-shriveling, and all-too plausible vision of a ruthless and crass digital dystopia...
The New York Times Book Review - Michael Wood
…the writing is never less than stylish and witty, and the sense of disaster, here as in Shteyngart's other novels, is unfailingly lyrical, performed for full, funny rhetorical orchestra…
It's perhaps not surprising that with his third novel, Gary Shteyngart should shift his focus from Russia (the setting of his first two novels) to the United States. The novelist was born in Leningrad in 1972 and immigrated to the United States as a young boy. He attended Oberlin College in Ohio, where he received a degree in politics, and Hunter College in New York City, where he received his MFA in creative writing.
Shteyngart's Russian Jewish roots and his American upbringing both inform his fiction, providing him with both an insider's knowingness and an outsider's perspective. In his debut novel The Russian Debutante's Handbook, a failed immigrant returns to his native country, designing financial scams to prey on clueless Americans hoping to make a buck in the ex-Soviet Union. His second novel, Absurdistan, is about a fat, wealthy Russian man who attends college in the United States only to return to a country he neither...
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(879 words).
It's perhaps not surprising that with his third novel, Gary Shteyngart should shift his focus from Russia (the setting of his first two novels) to the United States. The novelist was born in Leningrad in 1972 and immigrated to the United States as a young boy. He attended Oberlin College in Ohio, where he received a degree in politics, and Hunter College in New York City, where he received his MFA in creative writing.
