Gary Shteyngart – Absurdistan

This edition starts with three pages of appraisals. Additionally, both the front and the back covers are filled with similar quotes from Time, New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, Wall Street Journal, Publishers Weekly, you name it. I hope everybody can do like me and cunningly skip all these and dive into the book itself.

The synopsis is surely intriguing and whoever gets a glimpse of it would like to know more, ending up by picking the book off the shelf and throwing it in the basket case.

It’s all about the humor and, whether it is terribly dark, burlesque, satiric or ironic, Gary succeeds in putting together a storytelling that will keep your fingers turning the pages until you realize you reached the end. Obviously this won’t actually happen, but you get the idea. It’s catchy, funny, witty, and while I personally think it has its flaws, it all glues together quite nicely. The kind of a best selling book that is pretty good, despite its commercial success. Sometimes there are too many divagations, too many metaphors, too many descriptive scenes. The momentum is somehow pushed and pulled sideways, cause there’s drama and subtle existentialist issues inside as well, which are not always welcome. But if your critic eye is not in a bad mood that day, you’ll just enjoy the reading and fall in love – or at least sympathize, c’mon – with the central character. And that will do.