Super Sad True Love Story
Ratings26
Average rating3.4
15
Ratings26
Average rating3.4
From the New York Times [review][1] written by Michiko Kakutani, June 2010:
*"Gary Shteyngart’s wonderful new novel, “Super Sad True Love Story,” is a supersad, superfunny, superaffecting performance — a book that not only showcases the ebullient satiric gifts he demonstrated in his entertaining 2002 debut, “The Russian Debutante’s Handbook,” but that also uncovers his abilities to write deeply and movingly about love and loss and mortality. It’s a novel that gives us a cutting comic portrait of a futuristic America, nearly ungovernable and perched on the abyss of fiscal collapse, and at the same time it is a novel that chronicles a sweetly real love affair as it blossoms from its awkward, improbable beginnings."*
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/27/books/27book.html
Reviews with the most likes.
Shteyngart's telling of a future where the US has suffered financial collapse and is under the control of foreign national banks who are taking over everyday life. And Russian immigrant Lenny has fallen in love with Korean immigrant Eunice. They try to keep their struggling relationship alive on social media. Much of the novel is social media posts that demand the reader to keep up.
His characteristic satire once again rules the page in a weird but brilliant story.
Middled-aged, hand wringing New York Jew falls for almost inappropriately young Asian girl? Stop me if you've heard this before. Set in some not too distant, post literate dystopia where people are glued to their mobile devices texting ackronymanically with ROFLAARP and TIMATOV while obsessing over their credit scores, rating each others fuckability in real-time and shopping at places called AssLuxury... It's just all too very. Maybe this sort of winking irony is just lost on me.
I do have to say that as an otherwise illiterate second generation, Westernized (corrupted) Korean I got a cheap thrill managing to translate the mangled Kor-Engrish sprinkled throughout. Mu-she-suh indeed.
