Super Sad True Love Story--Gary Shteyngart


I just finished this dystopian novel that comes on like a torrent of hip tweets--only it's more elegantly written without a preoccupation on brevity. At 334 pages, it's shorter than most contemporary novels but like espresso to regular coffee, less packs more here. At turns satirical, unabashedly romantic, and scathingly political, this futuristic vision of New York (where live-streamed apparats rate everyone's acceptability and social value) lays bare the aching souls yearning to live, love, and thrive in a police state that favors the one percent. This novel isn't for everyone, but if you want an original book with a passionate heart beneath it, check it out.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Donald James', "Monstrum"

Donald James certainly can’t be blamed for lacking ambition. His Monstrum is set in a future Russia where a new party is in power with the promise of change, but people’s loyalties rest uneasy. While this grants enough drama as it is, stirring up this potent setup is a plot about a heinous serial killer who cuts up victims in puzzling ways, a subplot about an underground (literally) sex-cult, and the subversive rebels threatening the new government. Populating this universe is a gallery of colorful characters--an American profiler, an opportunistic police chief, a smitten doctor, a reluctant police force, the elusive monstrum itself, and of course the bumbling cop protagonist. Because of his political connections or despite them, a drunken cop is assigned to catch the serial killer. The doctor and profiler both pine for the cop, insisting on his affections, while the cop yearns for his ex-wife who abandoned him to lead a rebel group in guerilla warfare. More interested in a failed...
Read more

Salman Rushdie's, "Midnight's Children"

Charting India's turbulent history since its independence and telling it through a story is no small feat. Rushdie certainly achieves what he set out to do in that sense. Influences of precursors in the magical realism epic genre is very evident in Midnight's Children, I can't help but think of One Hundred Years of Solitude along with other lesser known works by Jorge Amado and Mario Vargas Llosa, but this is elite company to be aligned with and Rushdie certainly has taken the genre and made it his own. While I wholeheartedly embrace the ambitious novel, my feelings as a reader were somewhat mixed. I appreciate the abundant research that went into the novel, the intricate parallels drawn between the generations, the twins-- an allegory for Hindu/Muslim, India/Pak, India split between nationalism and the inherited British values and so forth, along with the allusions to mythical and cultural icons. The foreshadowing creates a restless anxiety about the turn of events that so...
Read more

Joe Sacco's, "Safe Area Gorazde: The war in Eastern Bosnia 1992-95"

This book is a special find for many reasons. The book is at once an in-depth account of a war from within its battlefields, an exquisitely drawn graphic report that betters graphic novels (to use the term "comic" or "illustrated book" betrays the gravity of this effort), or even the best war fiction for that matter. War photographs depict the physical destruction; magazines and TV news editorialize; novels make war poignant; but Sacco has surpassed all other available venues in capturing war with its historical, political, social, background statistically and spiritually intact that the effect on the reader is devastatingly personal. Sacco clarifies what mainstream media stylizes. He puts the Bosnian war in objective context as a culmination of religious animosity that had been brewing for generations with each side taking its turn as victim and oppressor. In a very telling segment he mentions: Croats are predominantly Roman Catholic, Serbs are Orthodox Christi...
Read more