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+.
March 9, 2008 at 9:09 pm
Ohmigod I h a a a t e d this book so much. I haven’t read Handjob and perhaps some immersion into his proclivities would have helped; nor am I up on my Russian literature. But of all the books I’ve read in the past year, this entertained me the least, made me think the least, evoked sympathy the least, and unfortunately stayed with me longer than most. Gah. I feel completely out of touch with whatever literary scene brought this to my attention in the first place. Oy!
To each his or her own, I guess…..
March 10, 2008 at 3:58 am
I think I know what you mean. Certainly that had to be the least sympathetic main character in a long time, up there with the super irritating writer guy in the Corrections. And there was definitely a smugness to the whole narrative that bugged me, like I said. But at some point I gave into the whole thing and enjoyed it, perhaps because I have terrible taste (as evidenced by the trashy books that appear on here regularly, as well as the little stack of Gossip Girls books sitting next to me right now).
March 12, 2008 at 4:55 am
I don’t think it’s terrible taste at all — sometimes it just works for you and other times it doesn’t. Witness Straight Man, a book that still cracks me up and leaves many of my friends perplexed at my “taste.”
I did like some parts of the books; the memos from the hotel manager (and that character generally) cracked me up. I can definitely see where a more sympathetic eye would find a home. I just missed it.