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."
Didn't even make it 50 pages. I think I'm just tired of this kind of white boy shtick. Everyone just trying to be Kurt Vonnegut and not really saying much.
cynical, dystopian, satirical
I hate the first two point of view characters too much to go on.
This book just never clicked for me. The satire fails, for me, and feels more like caricature.
Spent most of the book vacillating between thinking 'this is the most absurd version of the near future you could come up with' and 'well, I guess I can think of a precise, real world, current day example of this'
More like 3.5. Still not completely sure what I thought about this one.
Wonderfully elegiac and multi-layered. Like a good wine is ripe with notes and aromata of different substances, this book has so many distant echoes - from Goethe's "Faust" to Huxley's "Brave new world." Really enjoyed it.
That's a weird book. It describes a crumbling dystopian society that's believable/familiar enough to be quite uncomfortable, and the story of the relationship between two people who are both essentially unlikeable, although in different ways. Lenny is pathetic and obsessive, Eunice is vapid and annoying. The book is an alternance of chapters taken from Lenny's diary and from Eunice's communications. And the title is quite apt - I felt "super sad" when reading it.
And yet - I found myself continuing reading, wanting to know where it stops and how it ends, expecting the worst that seems inevitable and still hoping for a happy end. And all things considered, I really liked it, but I'm unable to say why exactly :)
I can't decide if I think he is a talented near-futurist with wooden characters or a wooden futurist with compelling characters, but either way, I enjoyed it once I got past the irritating first few chapters.
Honestly couldn't even finish the final third. I just found it unreadable.
A cautionary tale of how this country could implode just as the Soviet Union did. Or maybe a satire on the shallowness of American society and the acceleration of our loss of privacy and freedom. Or a paean to the end of literature. I can't say that I managed to scrape up much empathy for either of the lovers. As a point of fact, I didn't much like any of the characters.
Super Sad True Love Story is a novel set in a very near future—oh, let’s say next Tuesday—where the world is dominated by Media and Retail. The story is centred on a thirty nine year Russian immigrant, Lenny, and what could likely be the world’s last diary. As well as the object of his affection; Eunice, who has her side of the story to by a collection of e-mail correspondences on her "GlobalTeens" account.
While this may be a story of a modern relationship; there is so much more in the novel worth exploring. This Dystopian American back drop mixed with some very interesting concepts; including the fact everyone is ranked based on their Finances, Personality, Attractiveness and Fuckablilty, makes this a fresh and different style of novel. Gary Shteyngart offers a witty and very humorous novel but this book goes much deeper than this; I found many interesting concepts …
Super Sad True Love Story is a novel set in a very near future—oh, let’s say next Tuesday—where the world is dominated by Media and Retail. The story is centred on a thirty nine year Russian immigrant, Lenny, and what could likely be the world’s last diary. As well as the object of his affection; Eunice, who has her side of the story to by a collection of e-mail correspondences on her "GlobalTeens" account.
While this may be a story of a modern relationship; there is so much more in the novel worth exploring. This Dystopian American back drop mixed with some very interesting concepts; including the fact everyone is ranked based on their Finances, Personality, Attractiveness and Fuckablilty, makes this a fresh and different style of novel. Gary Shteyngart offers a witty and very humorous novel but this book goes much deeper than this; I found many interesting concepts in this book, which were well thought out and made for an opportunity to make in-depth conversations based on this book.
By reading this review you are denying the existences of this review.
The Old guy in me tired quickly of the Text message dialog, But was encouraged on by the anarchist in me... Don't listen to your anarchist side.
If you find your self wanting to close the book after the first chapters do so you wont be missing any thing, it just drones on and on with a unsatisfactory ending.
I really want to rate this 3.5 stars - don't think it's quite good enough for 4, but it's better than 3. The dystopian future is well portrayed and the satirical extrapolation of online culture is well done though heavy handed. Unfortunately there really aren't any likable characters in the book, so although I found it an interesting read, it was in a rather detached sense that never fully sucked me in. Still, I'd recommend it to anyone interested in the general subject area (dystopian futures and the direction of online culture such as Twitter).
