“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 Svanï 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 … 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?”
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