I loved his earlier work, A Russian Debutante’s Handbook, and one of the best jokes in this book is the irritating rival, Gary Schteynfarb, and his much ballyhooed debut novel, A Russian Arriviste’s Handjob.
Handbook was so hilarious because of his incredibly accurate rendering of every detail of pampered academic life and pampered hipster in New York life,etc. There is definitely a little of this in Absurdistan (notably when he gets hilariously nostalgic for trendy food), but what was a little hard for me to take at first was that he applies this same precise recall to all the Russian literary greats.
I don’t know why this bothered me so much initally, but at first it seemed really pretentious, like he was waving his hand in the air and yelling “Hey, teacher, I know this one! It’s a reference Gogol/Turgenev/Doestoevsky/Chekhov/Tolstoy” etc etc. But then I mellowed out and decided it was a loving homage and, anyway, those guys are really an underutilized goldmine of crazy melodrama and reversals of fortune, the likes of Aaron Spelling. (I myself have had many daydreams of soap opera adaptations of Russian literature, although it would be hard to top that Brothers Karamazov movie starring Yul Brynner as Dmitri — awesome!)
In the end, I really enjoyed Absurdistan, and enjoyed the little Cliff’s Notes refresher of books I enjoyed when I was a deeper, more contemplative, more literary person. My only complaint is: everyone knows that any self-respecting Russian drunken spree, of which there are many in Absurdistan, involves gypsies. You are supposed to cash your entire paycheck, buy some huge amount of booze, and then decamp to a nearby gypsy camp to party until you run out of adult beverages. Where were the gypsies in Absurdistan?
This lapse brings its grade from an A down to a B+.
