"I stood there listening to my father's killers. Oleg and Zhora were
of Papa's
generation. All three had been made
fatherless by the Great
Patriotic War. All three had been raised by the men who had managed to
avoid battle, the violent, dour, second-tier men their mothers had
brought home with them out of brutal loneliness. Standing before the
menfolk of my father's
generation, I could do nothing. Before their
rough hands and stale cigarette-vodka smells, I could only shudder and
feel, along with fright and disgust, appeasement and complicity. These
miscreants were our country's rulers. To survive in their world, one
has to wear many hats — perpetrator, victim, silent bystander. I could
do a little of each." The
young writer supplying the lines is
Gary Shteyngart, who moved to the United States from Russia when he was
7, while the young bereaved oligarch he's speaking through is Misha
Vainberg, who attended college here but ended up marooned back in St.
Petersburg. Misha is extraordinarily fat, ambivalently Jewish,
unapologetically rich and — as his homeland's best comic heroes often
are — infinitely thwarted. During his collegiate heyday, he gorged at
the American buffet, slurping up rap music, psychotherapy and the
sky's-the-limit complacent optimism that we take for granted as a
birthright but that Misha sees for what it is: a glorious
geo-historical accident.All he needs to return to the party (and
to Rouenna, his beloved trash-talking black girlfriend from the Bronx
who asks him, while touring his native city, the grand imperial center
of Czarist tradition, "Where the niggaz at?") is a visa from our
consulate. Tough luck. As the heir to an ill-gotten bloody fortune in
mobbed-up post-Soviet Russia, Misha can have anything he lusts for —
top-shelf liquor, pharmaceutical sedatives, human pyramids of
prostitutes and multiple alcoholic servants — but because of his
murdered father's global misdeeds he can't have that stamp on his
passport.He sulks and schemes. And Russia, in its wretched boom,
sulks with him. "Let us be certain: the cold war was won by one side
and lost by another." This epic collapse is continuing, we sense,
inside the circus tent of smutty new money that Misha has. Shteyngart
is a master panoramist who paints in just three tones: exhausted grays,
despairing browns and superficial golds.It's self-consciousness that defines our species, though, and
Shteyngart is hilariously aware that the selves we invent in order to
be conscious of them can be based on almost any difference. Ours is the
species that insists it's not one. How else could we justify warring
for common resources? Absurdsvanï, for example, is divided between two
ancient Christian traditions. The schismatic distinction is the tiny
line that the sects draw through the bottoms of their crosses. One
party's line slants up from left to right, the other's is angled in
reverse. Sometimes the Absurdis laugh off the split, sometimes they
fight about it. Almost always, though, some ambitious profiteer or
maniac is plotting new ways to use it to his advantage. Despite
being jammed with charged references to Halliburton, Bechtel and other
big-name players in the latest round of the great game, "Absurdistan"
isn't a book of social issues or geopolitical controversies. It rides
on top of them much as Huckleberry Finn rode atop his raft. Not
surprisingly, considering the times, it rides them straight downstream,
tugged by a bubbling current of worldly pessimism. Misha can't make
much headway against such suction. He's sluggish. Obese. He's consumed
his way into a corner. Shteyngart has built an apt hero in this
respect: a self-defeating fatso globalist. His appetites drive the
strife and fuel the tensions that provoke him to keep eating. Compared
with most young novelists his age, who tend toward cutesy involution,
Shteyngart is a giant mounted on horsebacke sweepingly and gets where he's going with far more aplomb. His
Absurdistan, to Americans, may seem amusingly far away at first, but
the longer one spends there, hunkered down with Misha in a hotel room
high above the rocket fire, the closer and more recognizable it gets.
Absurdsvanï is far, but Absurdistan is near.GET THIS BOOK FREE.BUY SELL RENT BOOKS FROM THE LINK BELOW.