Bret Easton Ellis and John Kennedy Toole are strange bedfellows.Ī good read, worthy of its praise. Also the mix of sexual explicitness and violence within the confines of this satire are conflicted, and the author struggles with this balancing act. For instance, a sex game that Misha plays with his girlfriend is to describe fake New York restaurants in the Zagat Guide style of writing. Scenes become a bit too over-the-top and morality play-ish for me.

In the second half of the book 'Absurdistan' becomes a bit too slapstick for my taste, void of the very clever wordplay in the first half. This fake country is parts of Somalia, Iraq, and the Gaza Strip at the heights of their civil wars, and Misha becomes an unwilling-willing pawn to powerful figures there. But it blows to be rich too, as Misha knows, especially when all he longs for is a visa to return to New York but ends up stuck in a third-world hellhole called Absurdistan. Misha sees the world as it is, stripped of marketing gimmicks to the often ugly misogynist ritualistic truth: the world blows if you're poor. Which is just where the 300 pound anti-hero Misha needs them to be.Īt its best 'Absurdistan' is clever to the nth degree. With one swipe, Gary Shteyngart brings hipsters, academics, politicians, MBAs, history and consumerism to a palatable middle-brow level. This hybrid of 'A Confederacy of Dunces' and 'Fight Club' the book is calculated and scathing in its language. Populated by curvaceous brown-eyed beauties, circumcision-happy Hasidic Jews, a loyal manservant who never stops serving, and scheming oil execs from a certain American company whose name rhymes with Malliburton, Absurdistan is a strange, oddly true-to-life look at how we live now, from a writer who should know. But after a civil war breaks out between two competing ethnic groups and a local warlord installs hapless Misha as Minister of Multicultural Affairs, our hero soon finds himself covered in oil, fighting for his life, falling in love, and trying to figure out if a normal life is still possible in the twenty-first century. Salvation may lie in the tiny, oil-rich nation of Absurdistan, where a crooked consular officer will sell Misha a Belgian passport. He's stuck in Russia, dreaming of his beloved Rouenna and the Oz of NYC. Misha is paying the price of exile from his adopted American homeland. But it won't, because Misha's late Beloved Papa whacked an Oklahoma businessman of some prominence. Open Absurdistan and meet outsize Misha Vainberg, son of the 1,238th-richest man in Russia, lover of large portions of food and drink, lover and inept performer of rap music, and lover of a South Bronx Latina whom he longs to rejoin in New York City, if only the American INS will grant him a visa.

Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart