Super Sad True Love Story in Ask Gary Shteyngart

Oct 17, 2013 Porkpie rated it it was amazing

One of the most haunting novels I've read all year. This story will stick in your gut and in your head like a hangover from a party you wish you never attended. It's bleak, dark, pathetic and surgicially incisive in its portrait of the last apathetic spasms of America in total decline. A darker satire you won't find anywhere.

The story takes place in an undefined 10-minutes-from-now American future, where literacy is considered literally smelly and useless, and fashion has jumped the shark from ...more

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Sep 26, 2012 Kiersten Lawson rated it really liked it

This book is much more hilarious than these quotes suggest, honest. I wager that anyone exasperated by the "always-on" and increasingly dim nature of our world will love this scathing but sweet satire.

"They stood together, silent, with their little chests thrust out ahead of them, their eyes quiet and blank, the seemingly endless continuation of their lives stretched out before them."

"I locked eyes with the elephant, and I watched myself being kissed in the prism of the elephant's eye, the gia This book is much more hilarious than these quotes suggest, honest. I wager that anyone exasperated by the "always-on" and increasingly dim nature of our world will love this scathing but sweet satire.

"They stood together, silent, with their little chests thrust out ahead of them, their eyes quiet and blank, the seemingly endless continuation of their lives stretched out before them."

"I locked eyes with the elephant, and I watched myself being kissed in the prism of the elephant's eye, the giant hazel apparatus surrounded with flecks of coarse gray eyebrow. He was twenty-five, Sammy, at the middle of his lifespan, much like I was. A lonely elephant, the only one the zoo had at the moment, removed from his compatriots and from the possibility of love. He slowly flicked back one massive ear, like a Galician shopkeeper of a century ago spreading his arms as if to say, 'Yes, this is all there is.' And then it occurred to me, lucky me mirrored in the beast's eye: The elephant knows. The elephant knows that there is nothing after this life and very little in it. The elephant is aware of his eventual extinction and he is hurt by it, reduced by it, made to feel his solitary nature, he who will eventually trample his way through bush and scrub to lie down and die where his mother once trembled at her haunches to give him life."

"All you could hear were the whirs and clicks of our apparati being downloaded and the competing chirping of the cicadas emerged from their seven-year slumber. And the looks on the faces of my countrymen -- passive heads bent, arms at their trousers, everyone guilty of not being their best, of not earning their daily bread, the kind of docility I had never expected from Americans, even after so many years of our decline. Here was the tiredness of failure imposed on a country that believed only in its opposite. Here was the end product of our deep moral exhaustion."

"I picked out the profiles that appealed the most to me, some for the usual financial, intellectual, or 'durability' (health) reasons, but others because they could not keep the fear out of their eyes, the fear that, for all the wealth and sincecures they had amassed, for all their supplicating children and grandchildren, the end was irreversible, the lapse into the void a tragedy before which all tragedies were scandalously trite, their progeny a joke, their accomplishments a drop of fresh water in a salty ocean."

"He kissed me on both cheeks and I did the same, feeling the flood of intimacy, of sudden closeness with a person who usually orbited so far away from me. The instructions, the Confucian-like code of Russian father-son relationships, spooled in my mind: Father means I have to love him, have to listen to him, can't offend him, can't hurt him, can't bring him to task for past wrongs; an old man now, defenseless, deserving of all I can offer."

"I breathed in the same breath as he did, as if we were connected. I felt his age seep into mine, as if he were the forward guard of my own mortality, although his skin was surprisingly unwrinkled, and he bore an odor of vitality on his skin, along with an afterthought of decay... I spoke about work, about my assets ... about all the monetary things that kept us fearful and connected. I gave him a photocopy of who I was, without telling him that I was unhappy and humiliated and often, just like him, all alone."

"I pressed myself inside her all the more, trying to wend my way into a place from which I would never depart. When I arrived there, where her muscles tensed and clasped me, when her collarbone jutted out, when the spectacular late-June twilight detonated across my simple bedroom and she groaned with what I hoped was pleasure, I saw that there were at least two truths to my life. The truth of my existence and the truth of my demise."

"Her hand was upon my cheek, and all the worries of my life were cupped and held within... 'Sometimes,' she said, 'I think you're not going to make it.'" ...more

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Jan 24, 2013 Laurel rated it it was amazing

This is one of the better novels I have read in a long time. Shteyngart looks into the not so distant future, and with great irony and satire, painting a picture of how the worst of our media and consumer obsessions lead us to our downfall as a culture. His anti-hero, Lenny Abramov, remembers the days when we focused on substantial past-times like reading books. He tragically falls in love with a much younger woman, who knows nothing of the pleasures of life "off-line". Please, read it! ...more

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Feb 11, 2013 Stephanie rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2013

Set in the not-to-distant future, Super Sad True Love Story: A Novel is about the decline of a post-literate America, a time when books are referred to as doorstops and reading drags down the reader's "personality rankings," which is kinda like a Klout score on crack. The plot is interesting, told through diary entries and email-type correspondence, but I had no trouble putting it down, and found myself skimming through large portions of the book just to get to the end.

I always copy or highligh ...more

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Feb 13, 2013 Peter Conti rated it it was amazing

He's the best writer who broke out in the 21st century. He may frighten many of his readers because it seems so true. As one of the reviews writes: it's the future-- it may be 20 years from now or it may be Thursday. ...more

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Oct 11, 2013 Peter Schmidt rated it it was amazing

Eunice Park and Lenny Abramov, GlobalTeen texting and Jewish comic pessimism: a super sad true love fiasco from our greatest contemporary satirist, an American Gogol for our end-of-empire dumb “smart”-Phone era.

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Sep 03, 2013 Donna Tuckey rated it it was amazing

Gary Shteyngart weaves a futuristic tale that is a must read for progressives and/or Libertarians. A satiristic view of America through the eyes of Lenny Abramov, the book is part mid life crisis, part big brother and part The Road. It's a great read especially if you can read it in long stretches. (Added 2/25/2014) I really wish everyone had read it so I could refer to it and people would understand what I was referring to. Although I read it a while ago, I can't get it off my mind. It seems li ...more

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Aug 30, 2013 Anna rated it really liked it

An uncomfortable (but hilarious) look at a possible future for America.

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Jan 27, 2013 Svetlozara Kabaktchieva rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Това е наистина суперсупертъжна история! Невероятно какви очаквания внушава заглавието - който видя корицата, заключи: "А, четеш си любовни романчета..." Да, но това е наистина нечетен и нечуван любовен роман в разпадащ се и изчезващ свят. Картата на света е абсолютно различна, а бъдещето е всичко това, което не си и помисляме!
Страшното е, че докато четеш, разбираш, че не е фантастика, а гротеска на това, което се случва днес. И ние участваме.
Много е добра книгата, много! ...more

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