Super Sad True Love Story [Kindle Edition]

Firstly, this is a great book - sad, funny, satirical; it's got the lot. The author seems to keep writing similarly themed books but each one in turn gets closer to being the "great" novel. If you imagine each book as "bearish Russian/russian american has romance and misadventures because they're a bit of a misfit" you won't be far off, just that each iteration offers something slightly different - just read Absurdistan and The Russian Debutante's Handbook to see.

It's actually part of a great American Artistic tradition, typified by people like Woody Allen and Philip Roth - I'm thinking Annie Hall [DVD] [1977] or The Human Stain. These guys come out with great works which all have one thing in common - a character who is pretty similar to the author himself gets to have sex with someone who's hot! I'm assuming this is just some sort of revenge of the nerds!

That said, this review is supposed to be about the book. Steyngart does a brilliant job of constructing an alternative near-future. America is bankrupt, and the world is dominated by China and other emerging economies. Privacy no longer exists as a combination of ipod style devices and a sort of neo-facebook broadcasts every personal detail, from sexual attractiveness to credit rating. The book is genuinely funny and has at its heart a love story between a mismatched couple as things start to fall apart.

Definitely worth a read.

The book is a romance set in a dystopian youth-obsessed near-future where China is supreme, a neo-facist United States is collapsing and reads rather like a cross between Clockwork Orange, Brave New World and Annie Hall. It manages to be funny, romantic and terrifying simultaneously and often feels worryingly prophetic.Like much science fiction it is more about today than the future.

Had Neal Stephenson written "Snow Crash" as a dystopian love story, I'm not sure whether he could have equaled Gary Shteyngart's latest, greatest, novel; a memorable exploration of romantic love set amidst a dystopian near future United States. "Super Sad True Love Story" crackles with much of the same high powered kinetic energy and swift pace of Stephenson's groundbreaking cyberpunk novel - the very first to offer a memorable comedic strain of cyberpunk science fiction - but it is so much more, a brilliant satire of clashing American immigrant values and a well paced, well conceived, romantic love story between the most unlikely of protagonists; thirty nine year-old Russian-American Lenny Abramov , and his much younger lover, twenty four year-old Korean-American Eunice Park. Shteyngart excels in exploring the inevitable cultural clash between immigrant Korean and Russian cultures, as New York City and the rest of the United States heads relentlessly towards both economic and sociological implosion. Here he relies on crisp, fast-paced dialogue which may remind some readers of David Foster Wallace's, often laced with pathos and sharp satirical wit.

Without question, Shteyngart's new novel is science fiction, even if much of the science fictional aspects of the tale are often pushed aside, as the author gives his readers full, undivided, attention to the romantic twists and turns of Abramov and Park's unlikely romance. Shteyngart's depiction of a New York City in the full brunt of a dystopian collapse, echoes Rick Moody's novella "The Albertine Notes" (from Moody's novella collection, "The Omega Force: Three Novellas") in rendering a similarly stark, quite bleak, urban landscape (And one which offers far more verisimilitude in depicting a near future New York City which Big Apple readers and others might recognize as potentially plausible.) But a more apt comparison Is with Matt Ruff's "Sewer Gas Electric: The Public Works Trilogy" for his humorous, often irreverent take, on New York City's impending doom. Like Ruff's mid 1990s cyberpunk classic, it is one of the best depictions of this city I've come across from within the literary realm of science fiction.

"Super Sad True Love Story" seems destined to become one of this year's critical and popular literary successes. It is certainly one of the best - If not the best - novels of this year. Shteyngart's reputation as our foremost living American satirist is secured with this novel's publication. His latest novel is a much more revealing look at human relationships than his earlier "Absurdistan", and one that is much livelier in its depiction of romantic love and satire. However, I do hope his future work exhibits much of the same literary range exhibited by the lesser known Matt Ruff (whom I regard as the greatest living literary alumnus, along with Shteyngart, of our alma mater, New York City's Stuyvesant High School); "Super Sad True Love Story" represents a major first step in such a direction.