Excerpt: Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story

Gary Shteyngart is the Sasha Baron Cohen of the literary world (though his voice sounds a lot like a younger version of Bill Murray & his profile looks more like a worn-out Salman Rushdie..)


Shteyngart's published his debut novel, The Russian Debutante's Handbook, in 2003. The novel relates the exploits of Vladimir Girshkin, a Jewish émigré from Russia who settles in New York and is approached by Aleksander Rybakov, another russian immigrant with ties to the mafia, who asks for Vladimir's assistance in obtaining full citizenship to the United States.


The book is hilariously funny, though it does have a tendency to drag for a little bit too long and go over the same subjects and dialogue more than once, but that's the price you (sometimes) pay for reading debut novels. Oh well..


Novels dealing with 'Russian' or 'Eastern European' characters (often colorful, drunk and speaking fractured English) have been all the rage for the past 10 years or so. Suffice it to mention Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated (2002); 
Marina Lewycka's A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (2006) & DBC Pierre's Ludmila's Broken English (2007)and you begin to recognize a well planned trend here. 


Shteyngart followed the success of Handbook with Absurdistan (2006), a sequel and parody of the charcters described in his debut novel as well as of the author himself (In the novel, Handbook and its author are parodied: the novel's renamed as The Russian Arriviste's Handjob, the work of one "Jerry Shteynfarb") 


The book was met (again) with great critical success: Absurdistan was chosen as one of the ten best books of the year by The New York Times Book Review and Time Magazine. 


Now (well, 2 months ago :) Shteyngart brings us Super Sad True Love Story: A Novel, a novel which, well at least according to his editor in Random House, "easily outshines his last two novels". The title itself seems to have been ripped from the Seth Rogan 'future films I want to shoot' sketch-book (if such a sketch book does indeed exist.. 


What's it about, you ask? Well, one could read it as a near-future Dystopia.

As Amazon interview Shteyngart's held with Omnivoracious podcast editor makes you understand, this is a William Gibson (though he's not writing any SF novels anymore..) meets Lev Tolstoy (though he's never really written any love novels..) meets Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City (not another NY Semi-SF novel!!) sort of novel.. 

Set in 'the day after tomorrow' New York (a city which, at least according to Shteyngart, "has nothing to do with this country") when "semi-illiterate America completely collapses" & where "the dollar has been pegged to the yuan, the American Restoration Authority is on high security alert, and Lenny Abramov, the middle-aged possessor of a decent credit score but an absurdly low--and embarrassingly public--Male Hotness rating, is in love with the young Eunice Park" Super Sad True Love Story is, in essence, also a love story, as the title suggests (though, as Shteyngart attests, "It's hard to write about love cos' that's all that's been written since the beginning of time".) 


It's also Super sad, which makes it even more susceptive to cynics.. 


But it's Shteyngart's emotional sincerity, nicely cooped up with a rare Academic-Speech weird appeal that saves this book from total hipster'ness.


VERDICT: BUY IT (cos' it sounds like so much fun!) 


P.S.
More (well, not really.. but still!!) on the subject: Nick Bilton's I Live in the Future & Here's How It Works

Excerpt: Michael Cunningham's By Nightfall

Live most of the people who ever read anything of Michael Cunningham's, the Excerpt Reader's read his Pulitzer-winning 4th novel, The Hours, back in 1999 and went to see the movie, directed by Stephen Daldry, when it made its appearance in 2002.


The 2003 film won the Oscar for Nicole Kidman of all actresses (ER thought Julianne Moore did a better job at her role than Nicole, but there you go..) On a side note, Daldry later on directed The Reader (2008), which was also an impressing film, especially due to Ralph Feinnes' acting, and he is intended to direct Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay in the very near future, if the film ever escapes 'development hell') 


The Hours was a very good read, even if not revolutionary in any way. The inspiration for the novel, as well as one of the strongest motifs therein, is Virgiania Wolfe's Mrs. Dalloway.  


I'm not sure whether Cunningham had anything 'new' to say in it (as all 'great' novels should do) but the writing and tempo (a very important parameter in a novel that's presuming to talk about any aspect in Time) were quite good, and almost all 3 interwoven & intertwined stories (Mrs. Dalloway, Mrs. Brown, Mrs. Wolf) were exceptionally moving in their ways. 


The Hours basically established Cunningham as a "major American writer." He waited a good 7 years before releasing Specimen Days in 2005 yet another novel featuring three stories: one that takes place in the past, one in the present and one in the future (well, in  The Hours, two stories took place in the past, one in the present..) As in Hours, so in Specimen Days, a famous literary persona and its work catalyze the different narratives and intersect between them. This time it's Walt Whitman (the book's title is borrowed from Whitman..) 


So much for similarities.. Other than the above-mentioned traits, the books are quite different: Hours basically follows the events transpiring in during a single day in 3 women's lives. Days tracks 3 stories quite different from each other, all transpiring in New York: the first takes place in during the Industrial Revolution, as human beings confront the alienating realities of the new machine age; the second is set in early twenty-first century as it tracks the pursuit of a terrorist band that is detonating bombs, seemingly at random, around the city; the third is a futuristic Science Fiction story, set 150 years into the future, wherein New York City is overwhelmed with refugees from the first inhabited planet to be contacted by the people of Earth.


The book was met with good critique but I'm not sure how it was liked by readers.. I know I felt like Cunningham thought was ‘on to’ something here and was taking us for a ride along with him..


But back to the present.


This week Cunningham's releasing By Nightfall, "a bittersweet paean to human creativity," a crepuscular tale of Marriage & Boredom which relates the lives of Peter Rebecca, SoHo art dealer & mid-level art magazine editor. In comes Rebecca's younger brother, Ethan, 20 something recovering drug addict and ruins everything, so to speak.. Or does he??

'Hailed' as "emotionally static and drearily conventional" by Amazon editors (aren't these people supposed to promote every book and pray to sell as many copies of it as they possibly can?? And on it goes: "Cunningham's sentences are, individually, something to behold, but they're unfortunately pressed into the service of a dud story about a well-off New Yorker's existential crisis.") the Excerpt Reader should automatically be inclined to warn his readers lest they befall such a dreary read as well..


But I will do no such thing. For, having read an excerpt of the aforementioned novel, I am inclined to decree that I deem this cery readable, page-turner-of-a-novel a worthy read.


VERDICT: BUY IT (But only because, deep inside, you're not too amorous with your own condition and are constantly looking for the way out.. Hence you are reading!)

Excerpt: Brin Friesen's Sic. and The Domino Diaries

The Excerpt Reader met Brin Friesen par hasard, as the French say.. 


A chance encounter in Facebook set me mail-to-mail with this young and audacious writer.


Friesen (self proclaimed 'a lumbering soul but trying to fly..' & 'The greatest looking author since Byron,') is the first ever and, to date, perhaps the only writer able to boast the seemingly-dubious title 'Author/Boxing Coach'( Self employed, that is).

But on a more 'serious' note..


Friesen (b.1979) grew up in Vancouver and later lived in Madrid and Havana. He debuted in 2006 with a novel named Sic. (from the Latin. Meaning "thus," "so," "as such," or "in such a manner..." The book was published by and/or Press, an anonymous publishing house which has published, to date, Friesen's novel and the novel of one D.R. Haney, Banned for Life, relating the story of Jim Cassady, the quasi-legendary punk-rock frontman who disappeared without a trace shortly after his girlfriend’s apparent suicide. 


Sic tells the story of a young boy, Jasper Finch, and his vicious junior high school years. The book was optioned for film the year it was published. It also won Friesen the Eric Hoffer Award 2009 for "Legacy Fiction," and was shortlisted for the Grand Award Prize. 


To get the average reader better acquainted with Friesen's world and work, the Excerpt Reader has held a brief interview with him. Here it is:

                                        ***

* Who is Brin Friesen?

I flunked out of high school and decided to hustle speed chess and teach people how to box while working on my first novel. I traveled around a lot. I lived in New York, Spain, and Havana off and on since 2000. In Havana I trained under Olympic boxing coaching and hatched an idea about a book on the role of boxing in Cuba and how the boxer's struggle has always been a metaphor in that society for the Cuban struggle. Still working on it.


* Why do you write?

Literature is my favorite company. I get lonely pretty easy. I like trying to get even with places and people that have my number. I always felt a little double-parked where I was born, so I had to try and shipwreck into strange places and people to see if I could do any better and feel at home.


* How would you best describe your books?


I'd describe my fiction as my best attempt to make sense of things that never made any sense to me in real life. My first book was about the best and worst day of my life happening on the *same* day: first kiss, first beating. The Cuba stuff is just an extension of the most fascinating place and people I've ever met and a lot of the work of George Orwell holding a candle in the dark about how to organize what I set it down.


* Who is your ideal reader?

My ideal reader is someone who brings all their prejudices and personal biases to my work intact as much as possible. Salinger was onto something when he dedicated one of his books to amateur readers. Individuals are the only people I've ever cared for or been interested in. The less they've been fucked around with, the better.


* Who is your ideal writer?

My ideal writers are probably the ones I dismissed at one stage only to find them waiting for me with a smirk when I came around. To me that's where the real loot is with literature: you have to come to it when you're ready. It's always waiting for you. By and large they go even further, too. Every time you return to their books they've changed along with you. If you've grown and brought more to it, it can offer a little more as well. I'm very greedy for anything in the world that the more time you spend with it the less you understand.


* How much of your fiction is autobiographic?


Plenty of my fiction is autobiographical. I think it's mainly a case of those moments that really shape you or disintegrate your reality - most of which you can't accept or really deal and maintain your identity - that necessitates exploring them in a fictional or fantasy realm. I fall victim to this all the time in fiction. Mainly I write about kids at an age where what scars them scars them for life and what compasses they find support them for life also. Both become a kind of fetish in a way, like the tune fairy tale girls hum or whistle when they find themselves alone in the darkness of a forest. I'm not convinced people walk away from much. We just look for new things to cope.


                                        ***

Friesen's provided the Reader's followers with an excerpt from his debut novel, Sic. 


The opening of the book reminds one of 'youth culture' movies (well, filmed from a more 'elderly' point of view) such as Gus Van Sant's Elephant and his Paranoid Park. The life therein described is a 'normal', day-to-day life. But you know there's catastrophe around the corner, lurking..




At the moment, Friesen's preoccupied with a new book, "The Domino Diaries", that's intended to be published soon, and which will also be released as a documentary film called "Hero, Traitor, Madness" (Friesen's filmed most of the interviews for the book and he intends to use them for this documentary.)

The book is an essay of sorts about Cuba, written through Friesen's highly individual and exceptional prism of Boxing, though it could well be read as a diary as well, or as a carnet de voyage, as the French like to call them.

You can get acquainted with some chapters from the book here.


VERDICT: BUY IT (because Boxing isn't only for dummies. & Brin Friesen is a living example of it.)

Special Excerpt: Great Jewish Movies for the 'High Holidays'

The High Holiday season can arouse strange feelings in an 'ever-wondering' and often soul-searching soul.


No matter the Age, Sex or Creed; No matter the orientation or Origin: Jew, Gentile, Hindu or Muslim may find themselves all of the sudden, and with no prior warning, emitting a silent 'oy' to themselves during these troubled days!


It could happen to you anywhere: on the train or on the bus on your way to work; Between the supermarket isles, whilst wondering which detergent you should buy; Or when you're all alone in the comfort of your well made bed, warmly tucked between the clean crispy sheets and your favorite down-comforter..


The Excerpt Reader, being the Schmuck, Klutz & Putz that it is, has rounded up a selection of movie excerpts, celebrating - well, perhaps 'celebrating' is too strong a word.. -ceremonializing, or better yet sermonizing Judaism in the modern era.


Why movie excerpts? Why not book excerpts? Blame it on all the rich food and cheap wine one obliged to consume during these holiest of days (or blame God.. whatever works better for you).


These are the Excerpt's favorite Jewish directors, performing their greatest tributes to Judaism in film:


First runner-up, Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator (1940). This movie is without a doubt a crucial specimen within the 20th century Culture heritage (if anyone were to make such a 'list' , as testimony for later generations.)

The selected scene is, naturally, Hinkel's speech:





Second runner-up, Ernst Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be, a 1942 comedy about a troupe of actors in Nazi-occupied Warsaw who use their abilities at disguise and acting to fool the occupying troops. (This genius film was later on re-directed by the no-less-talented Mel Brooks).

Here's a hilarious little scene which proves that even at the height of the 'days of atrocity' Jews knew how to laugh at their tormentors and, most importantly, at themselves:





A little excursion down memory lane might also bump you right-smack with Monty Python's 'Hitler in Somerset, Minehead' (well, England) Sketch (shot sometime in the 1970's, couldn't find the exact date..).

I think the quote "Oooh! I don't like the sound of these Boncerntration Bamps!" summarizes the sketch quite fairly..

A 'little' later on, and we're in 1987, in Woody Allen's Radio Days, another great cinematic achievement which retrospects back to the 1940's and celebrates the American (well, Jewish) family life during the Golden Age of Radio.

This scene gives you the typical 1940's (well, any time perhaps) Jewish family life portrayal:

But let's get serious! It's not all Hitler & Comedy for the Jews! 

Well, perhaps there's little else for the Jews for, even when they're dead serious, Jews tend to think (again) of Hitler and the dreadful holocaust.. 

Directed in the same year as Radio Days, Louis Malle's Au Revoir, Les Enfants, is a touchingly humane movie, recounting events in the childhood of the French new-wave director when he attended, at the age of 11, a Roman Catholic boarding school near Nazi-occupied 1943 Fontainebleau. 

Here's the movie's trailer, harboring the 'little' secret Malle the boy had to keep in order to survive: 

But as serious as it gets (and it gets serious..), it doesn't get as serious as Roman Polanski's The Pianist (2002), an adaptation of Jewish-Polish musician Władysław Szpilman's autobiography.

This overwhelming-at-times but nevertheless highly-important testimony for Humanity in its entirety, if not for Jews everywhere, performed by a great director at the height of his genius, should be a must-see on everyone's list, no matter the Age, Origin or Religion:

Here's a somewhat tacky but quite 'resuming' selection of scenes from the movie, accompanied by a recording of Władysław Szpilman's piano:

P.S.

I'm sorry, but there's absolutely NO Schindler's List for you! Strict doctor's orders! Nor should thou have any Ben-Hur's Ten Commandments or Chariots of Fire! This Hollywood'ization of Jewish life has gone too far! Someone should put a stop too it.. 

P.S.2

I think you understand by now that a little Cabaret's out of the question as well, thank you very much..