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Book Review: "Absurdistan"

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  • Book Review: "Absurdistan"

    "ABSURDISTAN"
    by Tim McNulty, Special to The Seattle Times

    The Seattle Times
    May 14, 2006 Sunday
    Fourth Edition

    Players in the fields of oil;
    The tale of an oligarch's slacker son trapped in a fictional former
    Soviet republic is a wicked satire of post-Cold War greed and ethnic
    strife.

    by Gary Shteyngart

    Random House, 333 pp., $24.95

    Russian emigre Gary Shteyngart burst upon the literary scene in
    2002 with his rollicking and bitingly satirical debut novel, "The
    Russian Debutante's Handbook." Its hero, like its author, was born
    in Communist Leningrad, raised in Reagan '80s America and flounders
    about wildly in the turgid cultural gulf between them.

    Misha Vainberg, the self-absorbed hero of Shteyngart's hilarious
    new novel, "Absurdistan," is also a misplaced Russian. His comic
    misadventures on two continents bring post-Soviet Russia and corporate
    America into the crosshairs of the author's outlandish wit.

    "Absurdistan" is a brilliant, fast-paced and idiosyncratic novel
    that swerves frighteningly close to dead-on political reporting. It
    is black humor at its darkest.

    Vainberg (aka "Snack Daddy" for his vast appetites) is the 325-pound,
    melancholic son of a Russian mobster and oligarch (the 1,238th richest
    man in Russia). Misha was educated at "Accidental College" in the
    American Midwest but finds his true home in a Wall Street loft in
    slacker Manhattan with his voluptuous South Bronx girlfriend, Rouenna.

    There is no reason for Misha to return to St. Petersburg, with its
    "bizarre peasant huts fashioned out of corrugated metal and plywood
    colonizing the broad avenues." But his "Beloved Papa" misses him,
    so he goes. When Papa assassinates an Oklahoma businessman over a
    percentage stake in a nutria farm, and then gets whacked himself
    (for other, unrelated business dealings), Misha's world constricts.

    Denied a visa to re-enter the U.S., he is forced by circumstance to
    travel to Absurdistan, a small, desperately poor but oil-rich fiefdom
    wedged against the Caspian Sea. His singular mission there is to
    purchase a phony European passport from a crooked Belgian consular
    official (price: $240,000).

    Life in Absurdistan takes an unfortunate turn for Misha shortly
    after he checks in to his penthouse suite at the Hyatt. He finds
    himself surrounded by Texas oilmen, Halliburton contractors and the
    busy minions of Kellogg, Brown & Root. Svelte Absurdi hookers ply the
    hallways, their faces "as powdered as an American doughnut." The view
    from his suite, however, is over rusted oil derricks and the brown,
    alkaline shore that hems the capital city. A rock headland across the
    bay is honeycombed with drab, concrete Soviet-era apartment complexes
    that warehouse Absurdistan's abundant poorer classes.

    When civil war erupts between the ethnic Sevo and Svanī minorities (a
    centuries-old religious dispute over the angle of Christ's footrest
    on the cross), Misha is trapped in the city. The inconvenience is
    sufferable. He has a good supply of Atavan and the bar is kept stocked
    with Johnnie Walker Black. American Express still rules, after all. But
    when the governing elites hire Armenian mercenaries to begin shelling
    the ethnic neighborhoods from the hotel roof, all hell breaks loose.

    Misha is embraced by a garrulous warlord with former KGB ties and
    appointed minister of multicultural affairs. Misha's innocence
    throughout all this is rather charming. Oblivious to the political
    treachery swirling around him, his only goal is to return to his
    darling Rouenna in New York.

    It may seem unlikely, but Shteyngart is able to create endearing
    characters who draw the reader in despite their shabby pursuits. He
    also paints a vivid and brutal picture of the kind of strife that
    rakes Third-World oil countries, and he spares no reproach for the
    American interests that bleed them, supply the weaponry and profit
    from reconstruction.

    In fact, there is something disturbingly familiar about Absurdistan.

    Shteyngart's wacky vision of a post-Cold War world sinking beneath
    the weight of the American Century is not far from the mark.

    Tim McNulty's most recent book of poetry, "Through High Still Air,"
    was published last fall. He lives on the Olympic Peninsula.

    Author appearance

    Gary Shteyngart will read from "Absurdistan" at 7 p.m. Thursday
    at Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park (206-366-3333; www.third
    placebooks.com).

    Salon.com May 1, 2006 Monday

    "Absurdistan"

    by Laura Miller

    In his hilarious follow-up to "The Russian Debutante's Handbook,"
    Gary Shteyngart proves himself to be the post-Soviet era's own
    Joseph Heller.

    Post-Soviet life may not need its own Joseph Heller -- and chances are
    it couldn't sit still long enough to read his books even if it did --
    but it has him all the same in Gary Shteyngart. Shteyngart's first
    novel, "The Russian Debutante's Handbook," described the adventures
    of Vladimir Girshkin, a Russian Jew who was unhappily transplanted
    to the U.S. in his childhood, as he seeks his fortune (and hides out
    from mobsters) in the frantically Westernizing Eastern Europe of the
    1990s. In Shteyngart's latest, the hilarious, caustic "Absurdistan,"
    another homesick Russian Jew, an obese innocent named Misha Vainberg,
    pines for a lost paradise. In Misha's case, Eden is the South Bronx,
    where he once gorged on junk food and canoodled on the stoop with
    his beloved Rouenna, a homegirl he hooked up with in a titty bar.

    When we meet Misha, however, he's stuck in St. Petersburg, penning
    this book, ostensibly his "love letter to the generals in charge of
    the Immigration and Naturalization Service." He can't get back into
    the States because his father, the 1,238th richest man in Russia,
    has shot and killed an Oklahoma businessman "over a 10 percent stake
    in a nutria farm" and unlike the freewheeling Russians, the American
    authorities don't take kindly to the sons of murderers. Thanks to
    Beloved Papa's wealth -- acquired through assorted dubious enterprises,
    including VainBergAir, "an airline without any airplanes but with
    plenty of stewardesses" -- Misha lives pretty high on the hog. But
    he longs for New York and Rouenna, especially when he learns that his
    girlfriend has taken up with the detestable emigre Jerry Shteynfarb,
    author of a crap novel called "The Russian Arriviste's Hand Job."

    After Beloved Papa is assassinated by another kingpin, Misha's
    quest to get back to New York leads him on a circuitous, Ativan-
    and whiskey-soaked journey to the obscure nation of Absurdistan,
    a former Soviet satellite on the Caspian Sea. There he gets caught
    up in the rising tensions between the Svani and Sevo, two Sneetchlike
    local groups whose primary difference seems to be which way they think
    "Christ's footrest" should tilt on the Orthodox cross. Ensconced in
    the Hyatt, where prostitutes roam the hallways, shrieking "Golly
    Burton!" every time they think they've spotted an employee of a
    certain well-connected American service-contracting firm, Misha
    forlornly e-mails Rouenna. Eventually, after civil war breaks out in
    Absurdistan, he takes up the Sevo cause, praying that for once he's
    on the side of right.

    The plot of "Absurdistan," however, is really just a pretext to
    bedazzle the reader with a series of rowdy and blisteringly satirical
    vignettes of life in contemporary Russia, the boondocks of Central
    Asia and, every so often, the Never-Neverland of America itself.

    Courtesy of Beloved Papa, Misha obtained a useless degree in
    multicultural studies at "Accidental College," a private (very)
    liberal arts college in the Midwest, from which "a surprising number
    of graduates went on to raise organic asparagus along the Oregonian
    coast." This education leaves our hero utterly unprepared for the new
    Russia, where he listens to a hired thug (Ruslan the Enforcer) complain
    that a rival (Ruslan the Punisher) has stolen the url for his nickname
    "Why can't my website be called www.ruslan-the-enforcer.com? ... I am
    the Enforcer. I know Ruslan the Punisher. He lives with his mother
    by the Avtovo metro station. He is a nothing man. Now people will
    think that I am him. They won't hire me to do the bloody work. I
    will be humiliated." Not that Misha doesn't have a certain kind of
    expertise. He arouses an Absurdistani girlfriend, an NYU student on
    break and equally enamored of the Big Apple, by reciting Zagat Guide
    entries for Manhattan restaurants. To local leaders hoping that the
    West will intervene in their conflict, he explains the grim truth:
    "No one knows where your country is or who you are. You don't have
    a familiar ethnic cuisine; your diaspora, from what I understand,
    is mostly in Southern California, three time zones removed from
    the national media in New York; and you don't have a recognizable,
    long-simmering conflict like the one between the Israelis and the
    Palestinians, where people in the richer nations can take sides and
    argue over the dinner table. The best you can do is get the United
    Nations involved, as in East Timor. Maybe they'll send troops."

    The Sevo appoint Misha to the post of Minister of Multicultural Affairs
    (even though they don't know -- or care -- what "multicultural" means)
    and he begins writing grant proposals to set up a Holocaust museum
    in the capital (a bit of a stretch considering that the Nazis never
    got as far east as Absurdistan, but the Absurdis think Misha can help
    them win the favor of Israel and, thereby, the Americans). Somehow,
    everyone Misha meets seems to know everything about him -- that he
    is a "melancholic and a sophisticate," and that he slept with his
    stepmother a few weeks after his father's funeral -- and finally he
    will learn that everyone in Absurdistan knows something about the
    civil war that he doesn't.

    In Absurdistan, almost everyone is working some kind of angle
    or wearing some kind of disguise, mostly intended to manipulate
    the prejudices and ignorance of romantic, patronizing, uniformed
    Americans. The hotel manager, an Armenian-American born and raised
    in Glendale, Calif., sends out notes in semi-literate English to the
    guests, trying to pass himself off as "a wily local instead of some
    middle-class brat from the San Fernando Valley." A Mossad agent posing
    as a Texan describes the extensive market research his agency has done
    on "how genocides are perceived by the American electorate ... We give
    these American schmendricks a map of the world and say, 'Point to the
    general area where you think Congo is located.' Nineteen percent point
    to the continent of Africa. Another 23 percent point to either India,
    or South America. We count those as correct answers, because Africa,
    India, and South America all start out wide and then taper off at the
    bottom. So, for our purposes, 42 percent of respondents sort of know
    where Congo is."

    Savage, but pretty damn close to the truth. No doubt Shteyngart's
    portrait of life in Russia and "the 'stans" is equally acute,
    not matter how exaggerated it seems. Like Heller's "Catch-22,"
    "Absurdistan" has the feel of a book whose outrageous caricatures
    will soon become shorthand for real-life situations. We're all
    Absurdistanis, or will be soon, and can sympathize with the beleaguered
    manager of the Park Hyatt Svani City, when he asks, "Why did all this
    history have to happen to me?"

    --Boundary_(ID_biVGIT729zZoQshUFE614w)--
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