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Super Sad True Love Story: A Novel |  | Author: Gary Shteyngart
Publisher: Random House
Category: Book
List Price: $26.00
Buy New: $11.85
as of 9/5/2010 20:57 EDT details
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Seller: cseereader
Rating:  reviews
Sales Rank: 111
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 352
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9.4 x 6.5 x 1.2
ISBN: 1400066409
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
EAN: 9781400066407
ASIN: 1400066409
Publication Date: July 27, 2010
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best of the Month, August 2010: Welcome to the day after tomorrow. In Gary Shteyngart's near-future New York, the dollar has been pegged to the yuan, the American Restoration Authority is on high security alert, and Lenny Abramov, the middle-aged possessor of a decent credit score but an absurdly low--and embarrassingly public--Male Hotness rating, is in love with the young Eunice Park. Like many of the clients of his employer, the Post-Human Services division of the Staatling-Wapachung Corporation, he'd also like to live forever, but all he really wants is to love Eunice. And for a time, despite the traditional challenges of their gaps in age and ethnicity and the more modern hurdle of an oppressively networked culture that makes your most private identity as transparent as the Onionskin jeans that are all the rage, he does. Super Sad True Love Story is as corrosively hilarious as you'd expect from the satirist of Absurdistan and The Russian Debutante's Handbook, but what may surprise you are the moments when the satire hits bedrock and the story becomes--no air quotes required--sad, true, and very much a love story. --Tom Nissley
Product Description
The author of two critically acclaimed novels, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook and Absurdistan, Gary Shteyngart has risen to the top of the fiction world. Now, in his hilarious and heartfelt new novel, he envisions a deliciously dark tale of America’s dysfunctional coming years—and the timeless and tender feelings that just might bring us back from the brink.
In a very near future—oh, let’s say next Tuesday—a functionally illiterate America is about to collapse. But don’t that tell that to poor Lenny Abramov, the thirty-nine-year-old son of an angry Russian immigrant janitor, proud author of what may well be the world’s last diary, and less-proud owner of a bald spot shaped like the great state of Ohio. Despite his job at an outfit called Post-Human Services, which attempts to provide immortality for its super-rich clientele, death is clearly stalking this cholesterol-rich morsel of a man. And why shouldn’t it? Lenny’s from a different century—he totally loves books (or “printed, bound media artifacts,” as they’re now known), even though most of his peers find them smelly and annoying. But even more than books, Lenny loves Eunice Park, an impossibly cute and impossibly cruel twenty-four-year-old Korean American woman who just graduated from Elderbird College with a major in Images and a minor in Assertiveness.
After meeting Lenny on an extended Roman holiday, blistering Eunice puts that Assertiveness minor to work, teaching our “ancient dork” effective new ways to brush his teeth and making him buy a cottony nonflammable wardrobe. But America proves less flame-resistant than Lenny’s new threads. The country is crushed by a credit crisis, riots break out in New York’s Central Park, the city’s streets are lined with National Guard tanks on every corner, the dollar is so over, and our patient Chinese creditors may just be ready to foreclose on the whole mess. Undeterred, Lenny vows to love both Eunice and his homeland. He’s going to convince his fickle new love that in a time without standards or stability, in a world where single people can determine a dating prospect’s “hotness” and “sustainability” with the click of a button, in a society where the privileged may live forever but the unfortunate will die all too soon, there is still value in being a real human being.
Wildly funny, rich, and humane, Super Sad True Love Story is a knockout novel by a young master, a book in which falling in love just may redeem a planet falling apart.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Witty, shocking and funny- I'm just truly sad that this lovely story ended September 4, 2010
Masha279
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I started reading this book having never read anything else by this author and with no idea what this story was about. If anything, I was worried that it would be melodramatic from the sound of the title. By the time I finished the first page I realized that this novel is anything but a breezy, sappy story. The satire was almost biting at times, but this book managed to make me laugh and almost cry before I finished it. I highly recommend it to anyone who likes well written fiction with heaps of social commentary and a sardonic twist.
Shteyngart's best yet September 2, 2010
Mal Warwick (Berkeley, California)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Imagine the USA 10 or 15 years down the road. The dollar is pegged to the yuan, and a tyrannical right-wing government is in power. The divide between High Net Worth Individuals and Low is a chasm that cannot be spanned. The country is bogged down in a losing war in Venezuela. Everyone carries an "apparat" -- an always-online device that broadcasts its carrier's Male or Female Hotness, health and nutritional benchmarks, and provides access to intimate correspondence. Not only are there no secrets from the government. There are no secrets among the people, either. Even your credit rating hovers brightly in the air above your head when you pass a Credit Pole on the street.
This is the USA Gary Shteyngart creates to showcase the truly sad love story of Lenny Abramov (Russian-American, age 39, depressive reader of books) and Eunice Park (Korean-American, age 24, anorexic, self-obsessed, and cruel shopaholic like all her friends). The tale of their troubled relationship plays out against the backdrop of a city (New York) and a country in the throes of total collapse. It's not a pretty picture -- but it's extremely funny.
Super Sad True Love Story is Shteyngart's third novel, and it's the best of the lot. It follows The Russian Debutante's Handbook and Absurdistan, both brilliantly satirical. All three are characterized by the author's masterful way with language and his delicious sense of humor.
(From Mal Warwick's Blog on Books)
Page turner August 31, 2010
G. Hopkins (Brooklyn, NY)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Beware! My life was put on hold by this plot. I just couldn't put the thing down.
 A Romance Without Heart August 29, 2010
Ben Mattlin (Los Angeles, California United States)
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
This is a very pleasant read--quick, funny, provocative and at times disturbing. At the end I felt profoundly sad, however, and not in a good way. Then again, the title did warn me, right?
Sad and slightly disappointed--especially after all the glowing reviews. It's well done and enjoyable, but ... maybe it's me.
I didn't really get why Lenny is so enamored of Eunice, for instance, or her feelings for him. Yes, she has youth and vitality, which he covets. And she seems to need protecting, which he finds attractive. For him, she's almost like a teddy bear--something he needs to keep safe because he craves safety himself. All right, I get all that. After a while, though, this grows pathetic and annoying, and seems simplistic. I wasn't really made to feel it in any way other than superficially.
Also, the whole corporate dictatorship/terrorism conspiracy business left me confused. I suppose that's because the characters are confused by it, but still, I'm not entirely sure it actually made any sense.
But as I said, maybe it's me.
Nevertheless, it's a cleverly rendered piece--by turns laugh-out-loud funny, with brilliant observations about personal behavior and politics, and eerily familiar. I'm wild for smart cynicism, but there's something off here. By the end it feels a little like a child playing at being a grown-up.
Much as I enjoyed it and gobbled it up, this book ultimately is a tad too dark for my tastes. I'd recommend it, but not for everybody.
America, Home Of The Free August 28, 2010
Jon Linden (Warren, N.J. United States)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
"Super Sad True Love Story" is a brilliantly conceived and exquisitely constructed piece of literature. The story is very much a deep love story. Yet, the real focus of the book is to depict the slightly futuristic auto-immolation of the United States of America. This self-destruction of what has been for a very long time the most wonderful and diverse culture and bastion of individuality and personal freedom is depicted as the worst American nightmare. All that we stand for is completely lost as a result of irresponsible fiscal policy and the failure of the monetary aristocracy of America to work to strengthen and stabilize the positive and beautiful characteristics of the United States, but instead they focus entirely on their own avariciously driven visions of what they feel America should become.
One example of this misplaced vision of America represented in the book is the objective of one of the largest companies in the country to develop scientific methods to allow people to live ad infinitum. The company invests huge amounts of its own capital and resources in attempting to defeat the normal course of nature and the aging process. Since Ponce de Leon attempted to find the Fountain of Youth in Florida, the search for a process of reversing aging has been a long sought after and always elusive process. It proves to be so in Mr. Shteyngart's book as well.
The story depicts an America that is futuristic, but only slightly so. The PDA's and Blackberries that people currently use have been technologically perfected to the point that written and spoken language has become arcane. People live in a visual society. All people carry a device that constantly is streaming data and information to everyone. The device is driven by the media and the fashion industry. The device allows the user to buy anything. It allows the user to rank people by a number of important factors, mostly though, factors that represent their appearance to others, not what they truly embody as human beings, but what they appear to represent by virtue of their physical appearance, the clothing that they wear and the manner that they present themselves to the public. The concept of a printed book becomes an absurdity, not even something with a collectable value, but something that people see as junk with a bad smell to them.
Ultimately, the United States falls victim to those fiscally responsible countries in the world. The Chinese, the Norwegians and a few others that have managed to take ownership of the United States by virtue of the collection of vast amounts of US Public Debt. Those who own the Treasury Bonds that the US Government is selling to anyone who will buy them become those with the power to do whatever they want to the United States of America. What they want is a vision that no true American can internalize without feelings of hatred and disgust at what has become of the country that they love almost as much as their own lives.
Within the text of this amazingly creative vision of the near future of America is the relationship of people to each other and to their families, friends and lovers. The book focuses very clearly and importantly on the nature of person to person relations in a world where the only thing that is truly valuable is how one is rated or ranked by the software on their streaming information devices. These relationships and interactions also are deeply injured and truly distorted in a world of images and debt. Truly, the author has captured the deepest and most meaningful aspects of life in America and most other places in the world today with respect to the true nature of human interaction and feelings and what happens when those important values are decimated in favor of a distorted concept of Capitalism.
Because of the unfortunate reality that the book may in fact be a prescient indicator of what may happen to the United States of America, it is imperative that thinking citizens read what is portrayed within and work in ways to try and avoid the total loss of the greatest country in the world. Americans must overcome the gross errors and improprieties that capitalism and government have foisted upon this nation and work in ways that will allow the United States to retain its prime position in the world. Whatever it takes to accomplish this outcome, however the citizens have to sacrifice to change the country from the destiny that is portrayed in this book; we must work diligently to make that happen. If we do not heed the clear and concise warning elucidated in these pages, we will be left with a life no longer worth living. We must seek to overcome the obstacles that are trending our economic and political and social realities in the direction of frivolity and disaster so that America remains the greatest place in the world to live and work. This potential reality is the author's message. No American can afford to ignore or miss the messages so well presented in this book. It is imperative that we all read it and consider how we can reverse the direction that allowed Gary Shteyngart to predict the future of the United States of America that he has shown us so graphically in this book. We must remain, America, Home of the Free!
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