Rating: 
Summary: the funniest book of the year
Review: Even in a movie, surrounded by enthusiastic laughers, I tend to think, "Hmm. That was amusing." But Gary Shteyngart's book had me laughing out loud hysterically -- inlcuding once on a plane to the dismay of neighboring passengers. Shteyngart re-invents the English language and creates a cast of uniquely weird and hilarious characters, which he mercilessly satirizes while somehow managing to portray them tenderly, with empathy. The [love] scenes between his hero Vladimir and his American girlfriends are painfully sad and comic at once and the hero's parents both crack you up and break your heart. Russian Debutante is an amazing and brilliant creation. Watch this guy's career. He's going to be one of the top writers of his generation.
Rating: 
Summary: Intelligent and Funny ?! You Must be Kidding !!!
Review: According to the reviews on the cover "Ambitious, intelligent and funny". How about boring and no imagination ? The book cover together with few first chapters is probably the most promising part of the book. But once it moves to the Eastern Europe it could sound funny and intelligent to people who don't know much about Russians and Prague (Oh yes, fictional Prava, is Prague, shocked ?). Prava is definitely not a product of the author's imagination as he claims in the book, people speak Czech, have Czech names and go to places everybody who has lived in Prague recognizes. You just keep wondering, why to combine the third rate gangster movie with the outsider ideas about the American expats in Eastern Europe and hope for a good debut . I would sure not compare Gary Shteyngart to Nabokov.
Rating: 
Summary: Not worth the time
Review: This novel has so much promise at the beginning, with Vladimir's adventures through Manhattan. At first, the story moves quickly and is extremely funny. When the hero goes overseas, it just turns awful. It becomes painful to read. The plot is absurd, the characters (who are hard to keep track of) are pathetic. Shteyngart should've kept the entire story in NYC. He definitely has a lot of talent, but he needs more discipline.
Rating: 
Summary: Funny One Trick Pony
Review: Okay, my two cents - borrow don't buy.I bought this book with high hopes; it had been highly recommended by a friend and the article about Shteyngart in The New York Times Magazine was excellent. I found the book funny in parts but ultimately poor (the NYT's Magazine article was the highlight of the experience). Shteyngart rides the shtick he knows very well, but going back to the Sov motherland he loses it. Some background on what I bring to this table - no Slavic blood but Russian studies major, lived in Moscow for five years in the 90s, still deal with that part of the world in business and private life. I don't have the same ax to grind as a Russian-American or perhaps Slavic-American would, but overall the book was a let down. The beginning of the book made me laugh in recognition in parts, but once Volodya goes back to the old world I just winced. I must support Kirill's review on this; there were both deeply humorous and deeply tragic aspects to Prague in the early '90s, but Shteyngart's knowledge and treatment is shallow. He is also obviously still in that post selective college state of arrogance - he needs to get over Oberlin. I can also say that despite his time in Ohio he doesn't know the territory of Ohio girls - I speak as one. He gets the social cues of Shaker Heights wrong. I'm not sure what if anything Shteyngart is going to do after this if he exhausted his real subject matter with the first part of this book. So, the book is funny, perhaps more so if you are looking from the outside in at the emmigration of Soviet jews and the disintigration of the Soviet Union. By all means borrow, have a laugh, but this book is not a keeper in my library.
Rating: 
Summary: Kirill, you missed the point!
Review: While I agree with Kirill's opinion that Gary Shteyngart's book is filled with cliches when it comes to depicting Russians (the mean babushkas, the Kalashnikov-toting bandits, etc..), I don't agree with his overall assessment of the book. The key is to understand that Gary is satirizing the whole perception of Russians by Americans. Through his flawless writing and very accurate descriptions of the whole expat and hipster scenes, it is clear that Gary is too intelligent to merely write about the Russian mafia. I think Kirill did not see it that way and read the book without realizing that the book is filled with irony. Another point I would like to make is the fact that Gary's writing is top-notch, comparable to Philip Roth and Saul Bellow. The story itself is secondary, just a vehicle to promote his talent. I think Kirill should remember that as a debut novel, this is pretty exceptional.
Rating:
Summary: Oops¿ some debut
Review: There is a standard cliché in every mediocre Hollywood action/tearjerker combo: a hero returns home after kicking lots of evil backsides in a distant land and overcoming his own identity crisis. There is prolonged, mushy scene of reunion with relieved wife and children, with invariable tree-wheel plastic bike near the front door, little league trophies and assorted tchochkes on the shelves... This book seems like an imitation of all this - a bad action movie without at least visual gratification of big explosions, car chases and leggy babes in distress. It's not only that. Apparently the author developed some alienation complex, taken to emigration in early age, after probably being called "zhid" a few times in Leningrad kindergarten, and - more often - "stinky Russian bear" in a Jewish school in New York. I am not very interested in what specific grudges and revenges he is acting out, but the results are not pretty. The problems with this book are many. The author doesn't seem to know the subject he is writing about. He can't get "Russian Mafia" dialogues or anything Russian (or Eastern European) at all - not even "Stalinist" babushkas protesting on the streets. Take an underpaid temp screenwriter scribbling third-rate movie with 67-th iteration on "Russian gangsters with nukes" theme, with "nyet" and "vodka" exhaustively covering his linguistic knowledge. He could do better job simulating "Russian mob" lingo that Shteyngart. Nor can author describe New York parties of Ivy League-ish graduate students. May be at least he gets what he knows better - a "Midwestern liberal college" (author graduated from Oberlin) and a crummy immigrant-assistance agency, where he worked himself. The book title and cover picture suggests at least some entertaining, gratuitous sexual debauchery. Neither name, nor picture, however, has any connection with the plot. Expecting reader will be disappointed, at maximum treated with this: "... biznismenski lunches, with postprandial discharge of weapons, deflowered Kazino girls going down on Hog, to the tune of ABBA's 'Take a chance on me'". That's probably the sexual high of this book - a literary equivalent of a titillating 2-second shot of the "dark side" in a bad action flick. The rest of what can pass for erotic theme appears simply... Midwestern - flat and boring as a cornfield. It is not clear if the author allows even a theoretical possibility that any Russian can be anything other than mobster or prostitute. Certainly there aren't any even briefly mentioned in the book. Oh, wait, there is also a demented WWII veteran, so full of ingrained racism (all Russians are, of course) that he can't even abstain from attacking some Egyptian during citizenship pledge ceremony. I feel like living on some other planet than Mr. Shteyngart, which curiously has an assortment of the same geographical names, such as Russia, New York and others. I certainly know many hundreds of successful people - Russians, Jews, Ukrainians, etc., both in Russia and abroad, of any possible occupation except the two above mentioned. To be fair, not only Russians are profusely touched by the author's venom. Almost anything Eastern European is covered with condescending sneer. Mr. Shteyngart can't pass a single "Stolovan" babushka without spiteful snickering about their "canine faces, wisps of chin hair", the only thing they can produce - a big dirty spit on our hero's shiny BMW. Readers must feel like reaching for bug spray to get rid the world of such useless vermin. The rest of Europe is proudly represented by a deviant, murderous (not to mention idiotic and physically repugnant) member of "Catalan mafia". One can only wonder about author's motives: that looking across the ocean all these locales seem too close to Russia, or is it a strange appeasement of upright Midwestern notions of morally suspect Europe, or may be the whole book is a globe-trotting revenge trip wherever a Jew can feel historical grudges (what's next on his list - descendants of ancient Romans, Babylonians?). Oh, and the pyramid scheme of Vladimir Girshkin, book protagonist. In real life, Prague indeed was a scene of some spectacular Ponzi schemes - without having anything to do with "Russian mafya". The biggest of them occurred in mid-90 and organized by a Czech repatriate from USA, Harvard graduate Victor "Pirate of Prague" Kozeny. It involved elaborate fraud with privatization shares, estimated up to one billon dollars. Initially the story hardly made any headlines in western media, while those defrauded were mostly ordinary Czechs. Who gives a damn - they were supposed to be funny little tourist attractions, for a few dollars ready to happily sing their tribal ditties and praises to newly discovered wonders of Big Macs and stock certificates. Anything diverging from this picture was less likely to appear in the news. Later Kozeny got a lot of attention (such as cover story in Fortune Magazine) when among the dupes in his next, even bigger adventures (involving privatization of Azerbaijani oil company), were former senator George Mitchell and a few other luminaries, who were supposed to provide a political muscle in Kozeny's fund dealings with local government. The story ended in... remember O. Henry "Babes in The Jungle"? There is always a bigger fish... or bigger crooks. This book itself represents a Ponzi scheme of a sort. It has a promise in the beginning, fresh and witty at times, but quickly loses traction. Jokes and dialogues become flatter and sillier, the plot - completely preposterous. Soon the only thing that kept me reading was sheer curiosity how bad will it get. Well, that was easy: by the end the book resembles content of a vacuum cleaner bag after extensive use in a long-neglected room: every stale crumb, every long-discarded cliché is found, processed and packed in a tight volume. If idea of gazing at the innards of their vacuum cleaner sounds like fun to some, one can safely assume that this book will find its reader after all.
Rating:
Summary: Hilarious and talented
Review: The unforgettable story of a struggling young Russian immigrant making his way through New York and Eastern Europe in the early 1990's. The book is beautifully written, stunningly imaginative and complicated. Hilarious dark humor, tenderness and intelligence are the other great qualities of this novel. A must for any serious lover of literature.
Rating:
Summary: The best new fiction I've read in a long time.
Review: Wow. Gary (Igor) Shteyngart has managed to capture what it feels like to be caught between worlds, and he's done it in engrossing, enjoyable prose. His protagonist Vladimir is funny and sad and not at all pretentious--he stands as a foil to all those precious heartbreaking, staggering geniuses that seem to be multiplying like rabbits (no real offense to Dave Eggers, who's ok by me). Shtenyngart nails "types" like there's no tomorrow--the one Slavophile in every crowd, skinny, pool-playing grad students, users of organic toothbrushes, members of the expat scene in Prague (recast as Prava here)--but there isn't any meanness to his skewering. He's just a damn good writer with a story to tell, making a lot of little observations that add up to something bigger. I checked this book out from the library but I'll be buying my own copy soon. Looking forward from more from this writer!
Rating:
Summary: Hilarious and mischievous!
Review: This is one of the best books on the immigrant experience, I've ever read. Move over Saul Bellow! Laugh-out loud funny, and yet strangely touching. Vladimir Girshkin is a hero (well, anti-hero) you won't soon forget.
Rating:
Summary: A treat
Review: I was recommended this book by a friend of mine. She had already read it, and knowing about my love of Russia and Eastern Europe, figured that it would be up my alley. As I started the book, I wasn't so sure, but even if the story does become a bit fantastical, it does make for a good read. In Vladimir, Shteyngart does capture something very universal in his sense of not belonging. Of course, Vladimir assumes that most of this has to do with him being a Russian-Jew immigrant to America, and lacking the kind of hard drive and ambition that his mother has that got the family to America in the first place. When Vladimir gets in too deep with both the finer things and the more base things in American life, he makes it to "Prava" (a slightly fictionalised Prague) of the early 1990's, ostensibly to rip off young American expats whose families have enough money to support the kind of bohemian culture these young people are trying to create there. However, even though a good number of the Americans there fully fit into Vladimir's picture that he's carefully constructed over the years, it seems that every once in awhile, there are people whom one meets that will not fit at all into that perception. And maybe, just maybe there's a chance for Vladimir to find a place in "American" life. For me, being able to read a book in English with the "outside looking in" kind of perspective on the craziness of a lot of Americans, without being mean, was quite fun. Also, it was fun to read a story that really does include the world past the borders of the US.
|
