Super Sad True Love Story - Book Club October '10
This book had a lot of hype coming out. I know I was really excited for it to come out and I didn't even know why. Well I guess I did - they had a great ad campaign which included this video:
So we thought this would be a fun choice for October. Maybe we should have done horror. But for the people that read the book - maybe a book about political propaganda is just as bad.
Mirka will be the discussion leader.
Here's the description:
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.
Get to reading!
Go ahead! I think people were waiting for Mirka. But I know she's been really busy.
First page, did anyone get an American Psycho BEE vibe?
Geez apparently nobody wants to discuss this.
I don't remember getting an American Psycho vibe at all. But when I get home from work I'll look over the first page again.
I didn't get the chance to buy it and read it in time. I've been flat-out with work and writing and what not, so that's my excuse. Sorry, Pete.
I'm about half way through this book and for me it's kind of losing steam. I'm hoping that if I stick to it I will get pulled back in.
I'm going to have to go back and look at the first page again as well when I get home.
Well, since October is winding to a close, I'll put in my two cents. I'm new to the cult, and just getting my feet wet, and I wanted to participate, but I didn't know if it was bad form to jump in without the "moderator" or whatever.
Anyway, I enjoyed the book overall. I thought there were some really great moments in it. Definitely some sort of political message woven through it, but I was kindof hoping it wasn't a "message" book. By the end, I'm actually not sure. Was there a cautionary tale in there somewhere, or was it just a supersad kindof love story.
I also felt that it DID lose steam. The premise is cool, and the world created is great. I still find myself saying "t.i.m.m.a.l.b." or whatever that acronym was - "throw up in my mouth a bit" or whatever. It's catchy, and fun, and cool. Like 1984 but with a punk edge. It wasn't a "bleak" future. Just a stifling one.
And as it wore on, it just got a little wearing. It had the traditional third quarter lull.
But overall, I thought it was entertaining. Good but not necessarily great. What do you think? Am I way off base?
-Louie S. (aka Apoc)
I'm glad you made the 1984 comparison. Because the whole time I was reading it - that's what I kept thinking. "This is kinda like 1984."
I see why you say by it loses steam towards the end (many reviews have said as much) but that (the latter half of the book) is also where the heart shows up for me (around page 180 or so), where Lenny really starts to realize what's up in re: his parents and Euny. Here too is where Euny finally starts to fish versus cut bait. All the emotional storylines start to really head forward from this part, for me. But the satire and the wit do start trending down at this point as well.
1984 - very much so.
Remember that this guy grew up in Russia, and came to the US in 89 with his parents (Lenny???) so he was very much living this life (sans the technology) back then.
In our conversation, he made the parallel from the USSR to the USA in that just before the fall of the Soviet Union, the flags got bigger, xenophobia got worse, and everyone was more suspicious of everyone else (1984???). And he points that the same is happening here in the USA - only he hopes, contrary to his book, that the end result is better for this country than for the latter.
I got a lot of "replaced religion" out of the book. Not just the typical generational fallout, but there was Lenny's soulful placation via his books, his outright disgust at the Korean Baptist rally (funny, as there are more than a couple of these in my hometown of Fort Worth), and the fact that his corporate office was in a former synagogue, (same promise - everlasting life, same Ponzi scheme - this was Shteyngart's response to this observation) Euny's attempt to fill up those god-shaped holes with retail purchases, etcetera... And yet in the end it seemed that none of them really got what they wanted from any of their methods.
Yea, you're right, the religious references - or the cynicism toward it - was pretty prevelant - and interesting. I wasn't thinking along the lines of how it paralleled the authors experience, but I guess everything always does in some way doesn't it?
Very cool. Thanks for the extra info and insight - makes me think of the book in a few new, different ways.
Excuse me while I go buy a pair of onion skin jeans.
-Louie S. (aka Apoc)
So do we just start spitballing here? post up our pet theories and observations or what? Never took part in a cultie book club, but I have some things to say about this book in particular...