In both societies, people have become more delusional to their infringing Government. Furthermore, with corruption in the government, lack of privacy, lack of a real education, along with no resemblance of a middle-class leading, Shteyngart society has resulted from a dystopia.
Although our current society is much like the future dystopia, the parallels to the are only parallels, we as Americans must first realize our most glaring mistakes and must unite to fix them. Works CitedShteyngart, Gary. New York: Random House, print. Get tips and ideas in outline. Special offer for LiteratureEssaySamples. This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible.
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This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again. If you are interested in this sample, we will happily email it to you. We will occasionally send you account related emails. Sure Thing. Order Creative Sample Now. Choose type of discipline. Hire an Essay Writer Get Outline. In the society in which Lenny and Eunice live, youth, sex, and data are all that matter. The populace rates each other on a scale from one to ten based on how fuckable they are.
Eunice initially embodies these values but she eventually learns that there is more to life than just being young and fuckable. Eunice becomes involved in their cause, along with the cause of elderly people who live in her building and are victims of discrimination.
Her desire to do well in life connects her to her sister and father. Although both Eunice and Lenny have been abused by their families, they call upon their cultural heritage to inspire them during this time of crisis. In any case, the book is hardly about True Love. Hey, thanks for the insightful comment there. Eloquent defense of the book; your commentary on my critical methods has led me to reevaluate my opinion on Shteyngart.
I think you disagree. Yes, yes, yes!! Everything you said echoes what has been going through my mind. My book club chose this book for the month of May. On top of it being extraordinarily boring and annoying, it seems to never end. I bought it for my e-reader and one chapter comes in at 87 pages!! That is not a chapter, that is a book itself! I hated Lenny from the start — he was whiny and his infatuation for Eunice never did make any sense, other than the creepy factor old guy, young asian girl.
I honestly loved everything about this book. I thought the writing was witty and believable. Shteyngart wrote a book that was neither completely believable, nor completely unbelievable. No, the aspect of the book that I had the biggest problem with was how hollow and cheap and facile it is. No vision, no answer, not even bold nihilism or wild howling — just a bunch of whining.
Your review is not very well thought out. The novel has all the nuance of a Pokemon cartoon. I see your hatred for the book, but I feel you want it to be more than it is.
That was the impression I got. I have a good amount of respect for this review! I understand that the point can be made that because his story is set in the future, Mr. His representation of different cultural backgrounds only went as deep as the food each group eats or the ways in which the parents of a distinct culture make their children feel guilty…which could have been easily drawn from stereotype or a brisk walk through Koreatown.
I could go on and on about the many ways in which I feel Shteyngart missed the mark on expressing anything truly vulnerable or messy. My heart broke for no one. I was never super sad, or super anything! Stir and break them? Was that his point? I could maintain no concrete position on what the point really was. The author sets the reader up to believe something extraordinary will happen for endless pages, but for all the hype throughout said pages, the book is concluded with a diluted and dull overview of what may be the most important part of the whole story, the resolution!
To me, this was worst part of it all. It was a kick in the teeth, like waiting all day for a ten course meal of turkey and stuffing but sitting down, instead, to ramen for your Thanksgiving dinner. Oh, forgot to also add, thank you for recommending some better books in the same vein. Very funny and sad. Dear Reader, I almost retched, and have had to delete all my Arcade Fire albums, knowing that somewhere, somehow Mr S.
You get the feeling that beneath it all, Mr Shteyngart is just a geeky 40 year old man, who feels a bit left out and wishes he was young.
Or even just a little more popular. All of this would be excusable, though, if only the writing itself wasn't so bad. Not just unfunny or unmoving. Hardly a page was turned on which I did not cringe. Take as your example: "I coughed into my hand, a painful chill across my body, as if an iceberg had stabbed me in the anus.
Your parents must be so proud. Imagine, their little Gary, a writer! View all 12 comments. Apr 22, Glee rated it did not like it.
Cannot finish. Super gross whiny execution of pretty good idea observations of a society obsessed with illiterate twenty-somethings who can't put down their smart-phonish "apparats" long enough to make eye contact.
Gross middle-aged guy pursuing 86 pound teenager and seems only to engage in oral sex with the kind of detail I can live without. At least for the first pages or so. I quit. One of those truly weird experiences View all 4 comments. Feb 17, Laura rated it it was amazing Recommends it for: people who think "social web" is making us all dumber. I'm distressed to even be writing a review on one of the many social networking sites that consume us now given the bleak future such activity is leading us towards.
If you ask people to friend you or if you use text as a verb, you should skip this book. If you ponder which designer to wear or carry will make the best impression to others, skip this book.
If you find "joy" in "communicating" via something you typed by thumb or via some shallow site like Facebook, then there probably just isn't a I'm distressed to even be writing a review on one of the many social networking sites that consume us now given the bleak future such activity is leading us towards. If you find "joy" in "communicating" via something you typed by thumb or via some shallow site like Facebook, then there probably just isn't any point in you reading this book.
Two of my favorite quotes from the book: "And the looks on the faces of my countrymen—passive heads bent, arms at their trousers, everyone guilty of not being their best, of not earning their daily bread, the kind of docility I had never expected from Americans, even after so many years of our decline.
Here was the tiredness of failure imposed on a country that believed only in its opposite. Here was the end product of our deep moral exhaustion. View all 3 comments. Dec 23, nostalgebraist rated it really liked it Shelves: sf , modern-lit.
Well, Uh, Jeez This isn't really "four stars" at all -- it's more like a superposition between one star and five stars. My favorite b Well, Uh, Jeez This isn't really "four stars" at all -- it's more like a superposition between one star and five stars. My favorite bit was that, in the near future setting, the U. Also, wow, Shteyngart really has a way with words.
The Bad: Okay, but on the other hand, Jesus Christ does this book exude smugness. The main character, Lenny Abramov, shares a number of biographical details with Shteyngart himself, and is the only character who gets anything like a literary viewpoint everyone else is depicted from a clinical distance, through dialogue and email-like messages.
He's pretty much undeniably a self-insert, if perhaps a partial one. And he is almost explicitly the only really human character. He appears to be the only person in future-America who actually reads books anymore. Bafflingly, everyone else finds printed books so unfamiliar that they complain about how they smell. He is the only person who speaks with anything approaching subtlety or feeling. The other characters, even the major ones, are broad, grotesque satirical types and speak as you would expect those types to speak.
He reads Tolstoy and talks like a talented novelist; his friends talk like characters out of the sitcom Nathan Barley. His girlfriend is overawed and somewhat confused by how sensitive he is, because everyone other male in this quasi-dystopia seems to be some sort of social-media-obsessed psychopath with no discernible emotions whatsoever.
In this fantasy world of vastly lowered standards, Abramov's basic and unimpressive human decency shines as if a beacon, inspiring fascination and trepidation in equal quantities among the unsouled husks that surround him.
On top of "smugness" we can add "creepiness. He is intensely attracted to her and seems to view her as some sort of tiny, delicate, Asian fetish object: She had full shiny lips and a lovely if incongruous splash of freckles across her nose, and could not have weighed more than eighty pounds, a compactness which made me tremble with bad thoughts. I was hoping that this was just an isolated episode intended to indicate how much of a lout our protagonist was.
Indeed, across the course of Lenny and Eunice's entire love affair -- which is apparently meant to be involving and affecting -- this kind of patter is utterly incessant, going far beyond what would be necessary to establish a motif or a theme and instead qualifying as an obsession.
To Lenny everything about Eunice is "little" and "Korean" and confusingly, enticingly young, and he sees her more as the sum of these fetishized attributes than a real person. The implications seems to be that Lenny's fetishistic view of love and sex should be embraced because it, being emblematic of pre-digital civilization -- creepy old white men certainly aren't a uniquely modern problem -- represents a superior alternative to the hordes of Barleyesque, cellphone-jabbing, Tolstoy-ignorant straw men that populate Super Sad America.
It's either this guy and his Asian schoolgirl fetish or the death of western civ! Talk about a false dichotomy! The Good: Okay, but your I'm done pretending this isn't an internal dialogue interpretation loses consistency when it concedes that Shteyngart's a good and subtle and perceptive writer in a lot of ways, but then expects that he is somehow totally oblivious to how bad his so-called "self-insert" comes off.
Take this example. This is a typical Shteyngartian joke -- The Bad: -- in that it's lazy satire based on Shteyngart's incomprehension of youth culture -- The Good: -- fine, whatever, but I'm going somewhere with this.
Indeed, this seems to be the point of this sort of thing. Some of Lenny's friends spend their time producing their own video podcasts, which tend to be trashy, hyper-sexual versions of political talk shows. In one case, the most extreme version of this joke, one guy simply alternates political discussion with uncensored footage of himself having sex. All of this seems like a response to an anxiety about sex, romance, intimacy and the like -- an attempt to assert a confident comfort about these subjects while also avoiding their most appealing and potentially embarrassing aspects.
So goes the naive response. And yet the SUK DIK-wearers undoubtedly have their own share of hang-ups, anxieties, and possibly even socially unacceptable fetishes, just like Lenny Abramov.
The culture they embrace is inane, boring, unmoving and not even interesting on a sexual level, which is all by design, since its purpose is to make sure that no one, at any point, ever feels even a little vulnerable. So the embarrassing and cringe-inducing aspects of Lenny's fumbles toward intimacy, the almost gross-out lengths to which Shteyngart takes these things, are intended to stress just how much easier it is to hole yourself up in your unassailably pointless SUK DIK shirt and pretend you know what the fuck you're doing.
Shteyngart wants you to respond negatively to his protagonist so you can realize that responses like that are part of the psychological armor you wear to prevent yourself from having to think about how unavoidably risky it is to open up to people. Psychiatrist, heal thyself! The Bad: Okay, but now you're imagining Shteyngart as some sort of highly subtle writer, and I just don't think that matches the evidence.
For instance, okay, suppose we detach Lenny from Shteyngart himself. Maybe Lenny's even one of those "unreliable narrators" you like so much. But what about the sections not told from Lenny's perspective? These are collections of what amount to emails, mostly to or from Eunice. Eunice talks in an absurd melange of grotesque future-slang, Valley Girl superficiality, and that kind of plodding "um I think that maybe it's kind of like [insert cliche here], whoa I just blew my own mind" talk that bad writers use to indicate that a character isn't exactly the brightest bulb in the box.
Lenny condescends to her because she's been educated in Idiocracy-land where people only "scan texts" rather than reading and communicate largely in "Images" [capitalization in original], which makes no sense whatsoever in the age of Harry Potter and text messaging.
What could it even mean to "communicate in Images"? Eunice finds the idea of reading books incomprehensible and yet she communicates with her friends and parents in long emails.
How does this fit together? Where is the authorial control? And yet in many ways the Eunice of the emails looks worse than the Eunice in Lenny's mind -- an idiotic Californian stereotype who Shteyngart cruelly presses into service for the sake of his dumb, bargain-bin "satire" at the expense of real characterization. The Good: But surely that isn't true.
After all, Eunice comes across in the emails as a sympathetic and well-rounded character. You were emotionally moved by some of her sections. You can't deny that -- we're the same person! And aren't you missing the fact that a lot of this satire is meant to turn back around and blow up in Lenny's face?
Every time I thought of killing myself in my dorm room I thought of what Prof Margaux said just started howling with laughter. Lenny always quotes this guy Froid who was a psychiatrist who said that the best we can do is turn all our crazy misery, all our parents [sic] bullshit, into common unhappinesss. Sign me up. So, yes, even in a serious moment like this, Shteyngart can't help but do the "kids these days are dumb" thing "Lenny always quotes this guy Froid".
But on the other hand, this is a fascinating sentiment wonderfully expressed, and the essentially insignificant errors what could be less significant than a spelling error that doesn't impede comprehension? What does it add to "quote this guy Freud" in this context? What is all this learning worth if you're just another pretentious schmuck who thinks his emotions are more real than other people's, because you can state yours in a high-status register?
Lenny's sections of the book are filled with anxiety about his own lack of real skills, his near-zero comprehension of the political and economic scene, his deafness to the nuances of sartorial taste and social decorum. Eunice isn't just a girlfriend or a contact point with youth culture, she's a surrogate mom. Somewhere inside, he knows that this "the only man in America who reads anymore" schtick doesn't really do justice to the complex souls of the people who cross his path and share his bed, but he can't bear to give it up without collapsing into an anxious wreck.
Let me get this straight: you were telling me this book was "smug"? The Bad: But none of this counteracts the basic lack of authorial control that pervades the entire book. You are making everything very complicated and subtle, which is easy to do because Shteyngart hasn't actually done the work of teasing any of these ideas apart before splattering them onto the page.
Yes, there's real, involving characterization in the Eunice sections. I'm not denying that Shteyngart is talented. But talent isn't the same as control, and he seems to have no idea what he's doing. The point about that guy Froid is well taken, but it simply can't account for the tide of horrible shit that Shteyngart lets himself write in the Eunice sections; it's impossible to believe that a real person could possibly talk like this, at least not in a world where people can be as lyrical as Lenny is.
He appears in the emails occasionally, and comes off as awkward and embarrassing, but humanly so rather than grotesquely so. The sheer stupidity of a lot of Eunice's dialogue makes the central love story hard to buy or care about, because the characters just don't seem compatible on any level -- and then the sections that rise above this stupidity like the one you quoted feel like they come from a different book entirely.
Some of Eunice's more baffling statements and decisions play very well into element c but interfere with element a. These emails are presented as objectively existing texts, so there's no way to explain the way that they feel focalized through Lenny's perspective. The Lenny perspective isn't some unreliable narrator thing -- it is literally, if you strip away all the glitz and excuses, how Shteyngart sees the world.
The blurbs and pull-quotes for this book were unbelievable. Praising this book in this way feels a bit like patting Lenny Abramov on the back for being a nice guy who reads books, while he meanwhile leers at Korean girls has he mentioned that they're Korean?
This is very important to him! The Good: Okay, but now it sounds like you're saying that this book, although demonstrative of talent, was bad because it made you uncomfortable and made you feel things you weren't sure how to categorize.
Isn't that the point of literature, or something? Surely, as I've argued already, it is the point of this book! The Bad: On the other hand, we've had a weird time these past few weeks, and just about everything has been an emotional roller coaster, intrinsic qualities aside. What I'm saying is more that this book, although it deftly presses many emotional buttons, leaves no sense of hidden depths or subtlety.
It is not a book we will find ourselves returning to much in our thoughts, or one we will ever want to re-read. The insincerity of your arguments will become clear as the book's memory fades in hindsight. Anything subtle is worth revisiting; this book isn't. The Good: You don't think it might be worth revisiting just for its, like, ebullient-yet-lapidary prose? I mean, check out this phrase you noted down while racing through the last 50 pages tonight: "the claret of labor in her cheeks.
Those ruddy, laborious plosives! That's like something Nabokov would say. Isn't he your hero or something? The Bad: Look, this is a novel where, when the main character reads to his girlfriend in bed, in a stupid scene that's supposed to illustrate how he's all literary and she doesn't get how books work, the book he chooses to read is The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
I mean, of all of the bad, smug, middlebrow shit he could have chosen. That's like our least favorite book! It hurts ussssss, precious! The Good: And yet, there are plenty of perfectly competent, basically not that interesting books that we have four-starred because they were "objectively good. Which is a pretty inarguable reason to give this one at least four stars, right? Even if it just got your goat, I mean, surely that's something? Apr 20, emma rated it did not like it Shelves: read-for-school.
I doubt I would have finished this if it wasn't required reading for a class. It was a bizarre mashup of American consumerism, societal decay, obsession with technology, the search for immortality, and depressing relationships that I wasn't able to get into. My main issue with this novel was really the main characters, though. I just couldn't bring myself to care ab edit: downgrading this to one star, because I was thinking about this book today and all I can really remember is how much I hated it.
I just couldn't bring myself to care about what happened to them, and that made getting through the book pretty difficult. Eunice's chapters were a bit better than Lenny's but not by much, mainly because they were about her interacting with people rather than Lenny's ramblings about how much of a failure his life has been and how sorry he feels for himself. The only semi-decent part about it is that the world it's set in is kinda interesting?
The decline of the US and rise of China, the rabid consumerism, the need to be constantly connected online and the total loss of interest in reading and literature Although it's incredibly depressing view of the near future, it's also sort of morbidly fascinating and plausible.
Jun 08, Rayroy rated it did not like it Shelves: just-bad-cuz. Worst Book Ever! Hated Lenny and his old hipster pals so much that I didn't enjoy, an otherwise good read. It seems Gary Shetyngat, wrote this book for smug "New York Times" reading intellectuals who are ashamed of thier own farts, don't own a T. This was overrated and a waste because while the idea of th Worst Book Ever! Fuck this book The fact that people act like Lenny and his pals angers me! It has that attitude that if you live in a red-state or like baseball that you are culturally retarded, fuckoff hipsters and fuck yuppies you smell overwhelming smug View 2 comments.
Feb 12, Melissa rated it it was amazing Shelves: favorites , you-should-read-these. This was one of the greatest novels I've read in some time. Shteyngart is so clever and creative and, as Eunice in this book would say, "brain smart," that he actually makes me realize I'm probably not cut out to be a writer myself.
The book is a painfully believable vision of the not-too-distant future. Every parody of modern life is spot on -- the disintegrated language, the vapid culture, the obsession with wealth and longevity, America's crumbling economy and world standing caused by ongoing This was one of the greatest novels I've read in some time. This is the second book of his I read.
The first was Absurdistan and, although you get the feeling that the main character of both books are based off of himself, Lenny is a much more relatable character. Everyone who reads a book like this is going to be, well, a reader, in a time when there really aren't that many readers.
How can we, as readers, not sympathize with a man who insists upon holding onto his "printed, bound media artifacts" when everyone else thinks they're smelly? He's a dork, and you want him to come out on top, even though it's fairly clear from the start that this is a man who was not made for his times and probably cannot win. Super sad? Also super funny, super clever, and, I'd say, super prescient.
Super good! Super read it. May 02, Alex rated it it was ok Recommends it for: people who are into Asian girls and don't think that's racist. Shelves: old-guys-and-young-women , dick-lit , We were arguing about John Updike the other day, about how he "persists in the bizarre, adolescent belief that getting to have sex with whomever one wants whenever one wants to is a cure for human despair.
But then he and the young lady have sex and "she groaned with what I hoped was pleasure" - and it's confirmed by her: "it wasn't bad. What he lacks in looks he more than makes up for in passion. So Sheyngart is indulging in some wish fufillment. He's all, "I know this is pathetic, but here's what I wish Aside from that, the book's setting is the near future, where all our dumbest and most obvious fears have come to pass.
Ladies are wearing see-through jeans. Everyone's personal computers broadcast their "Fuckability scores". The Occupy movement has armed itself. It's meant as an examination of getting old, and the lengths we'll go to to fight it. It's not that I don't get it; how could I miss it? It's not subtle. I just don't think the examination is carried out in an interesting or perceptive way. I found this dull and embarrassingly transparent. I've heard Absurdistan is better, but this one is lame enough that better is still bad.
Shteyngart, like old people, is going on the discard pile. Jul 25, christa rated it it was amazing. Gary Shteyngart's fuckability levels must be off the chart right now. If he were to walk past a credit pole, numbers that rival elite college standard SAT scores blink in his wake.
He might even be considered a candidate for eternal life, according to the Post Human Services division of the Staatling-Wapachung Corporation -- if he drinks his green tea and veers clear of trans fats. Gary Shteyngart is so hot right now. He's a newly-minted member of The New Yorker's "20 Under 40" club; Every bit of Gary Shteyngart's fuckability levels must be off the chart right now.
He's a newly-minted member of The New Yorker's "20 Under 40" club; Every bit of media in the world that writes about writers is writing about him; There is a kicky trailer for his third novel "Super Sad True Love Story," with a cast so ripe with hot author-types that it is damn-near a literary equivalent of the movie "The Outsiders.
Thomas Howell, and raise you a Jay McInerney. If you set aside the very farkle narkle media blitz that is required to have an "it" book, "Super Sad True Love Story" stands on its own. Although saturating the internet with Gary Shteyngart is very much in line with the theme of his dystopic love story set in a recognizable future where iPhone-like devices are called aparats, and everyone communicates on a social networking site called GlobalTeens, a hybrid of Facebook, YouTube, online banking, Google reader and "Am I Hot or Not.
Lennie Abramov is, by pop standards, an old man. The son of Russian immigrants, a slight Jewish man with a sunken face and gleaming white forehead and a sickle of a nose. On his last night of a yearlong work trip in Rome, he meets Eunice -- a young Korean hottie matottie in her early 20s -- and they have an awkward sexual exchange. While Lennie romanticizes the event, starts mentally planning a life with the pound minx, Eunice is GlobalTeening her BFF about the gross guy she hooked up with, his awful bunions, how she had to teach him to brush his teeth.
Lennie returns to his unfashionable digs in the Lower East Side all the cool kids -- those involved with Media, Credit, or Retail -- live on Staten Island. The single-party United States is at war with Venezuela. The dollar has been replaced by Chinese yaun. Girls wear onion-skin jeans, see-through attire that reveals waxing habits.
Book-books are considered archaic and stinky. Reading one on an airplane draws the same sneers as, say, lighting a cigarette. Credit poles line the streets of New York, rankings projected when you walk past. A person's fuckability number is always recalibrating. Go to a bar, and with a few taps on an aparat, you can learn that you are considered by other patrons to be the least attractive man in the room. Eventually Eunice accepts Lennie's invitation to return to the U.
Her father, a violent drunk, is tormenting her mother, an enabler, and her sister, a blossoming activist, over things like spoiled tofu.
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