"Little Failure, A Memoir" from Gary Shteyngart
The first question that comes to mind with this book is "what is someone in their early forties doing writing a memoir?" Given the amount of chemicals and alcohol he details ingesting, maybe he wanted to get his early life down on the page while it's still fresh, and there. The better answer is that he sees an immigrant story that is somewhat universal but rarely told in such a blunt and self-deprecating way that gets to the difficult truth of the experience.
This book, to use a cliche, "pulls no punches". Coming to America from Leningrad at the age of six with his parents and a grandmother, he has a long hill to climb learning English and integrating himself into communities with many more prosperous families. He slowly assimilates, accepting regular beatings throughout his childhood from classmates and frequent humiliations by his parents. The book has integrity because one cannot fathom this being anything but the truth, given the unattractive character he paints(himself) at many points. He notes that his parents finally began to get along with each other, and with him, when he left for college, was no longer around.
He wanted to be a writer and stuck to it despite his parents fervent desire that he be a lawyer. Through a quick and fortuitous series of events at the age of 29, he went from writing in anonymity, poverty, and being a mooch extraordinaire to having his first book published, one that he viewed as still a work in progress. "The Russian Debutante's Ball" was a major success. He followed that with the equally successful "Absurdistan" several years later. At the time that he was writing these books he went through a series of mostly dysfunctional relationships that he needed, mostly is said as one with a girl from Raleigh, N.C. could only be called redemptive.
Those first two books seemed to be based on the premise that every other sentence needed to be a punch line for a guffaw. Here, they eventually seemed exhausting but the younger reading public took to them in a major way. "Super Sad True Love Story" mostly broke that pattern, and "Little Failure" leaves it behind. Not that this memoir doesn't have its humorous twists and turns, but non-fiction often leaves a jagged edge beneath the laugh.
This unexpected memoir works.
This book, to use a cliche, "pulls no punches". Coming to America from Leningrad at the age of six with his parents and a grandmother, he has a long hill to climb learning English and integrating himself into communities with many more prosperous families. He slowly assimilates, accepting regular beatings throughout his childhood from classmates and frequent humiliations by his parents. The book has integrity because one cannot fathom this being anything but the truth, given the unattractive character he paints(himself) at many points. He notes that his parents finally began to get along with each other, and with him, when he left for college, was no longer around.
He wanted to be a writer and stuck to it despite his parents fervent desire that he be a lawyer. Through a quick and fortuitous series of events at the age of 29, he went from writing in anonymity, poverty, and being a mooch extraordinaire to having his first book published, one that he viewed as still a work in progress. "The Russian Debutante's Ball" was a major success. He followed that with the equally successful "Absurdistan" several years later. At the time that he was writing these books he went through a series of mostly dysfunctional relationships that he needed, mostly is said as one with a girl from Raleigh, N.C. could only be called redemptive.
Those first two books seemed to be based on the premise that every other sentence needed to be a punch line for a guffaw. Here, they eventually seemed exhausting but the younger reading public took to them in a major way. "Super Sad True Love Story" mostly broke that pattern, and "Little Failure" leaves it behind. Not that this memoir doesn't have its humorous twists and turns, but non-fiction often leaves a jagged edge beneath the laugh.
This unexpected memoir works.
posted by John Borden at 11:39 AM
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