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Showing posts from March, 2011

Another Jewish Author: I'm Getting Older

My friend Adam got me to read The Ask by Sam Lipsyte , because it was about a guy who works in a Development office. It's pretty well written, really well written. It lead me to Shteyngart . Both works and authors are battling with satire and winning, but the work can be pretty depressing as a result, albeit truthful. Am I now stuck on this Jewish author trend for a while? I remember after reading Goodbye, Columbus in high school, I said I'd never do it again....at least 'til I was older. fin.

Absurdistan

I just finished reading Gary Shteyngart's Absurdistan . The book will stay with me for a long time, its truth and American English lyricism. The New York Times Review of Books was thrilled and emphatic about the book Why praise it first? Just quote from it — at random. Just unbutton its shirt and let it bare its chest. Like a victorious wrestler, this novel is so immodestly vigorous, so burstingly sure of its barbaric excellence, that simply by breathing, sweating and standing upright it exalts itself. And so: As depressed and immobile as a twenty-first-century Oblomov , I lay on my bed scrolling through the darkest corners of the Internet, the laptop whizzing and bleating atop the mound of my stomach. I watched all kinds of unfortunate women being degraded and humiliated, tied up, spat upon, forced to swallow gigantic penises, and I wished I could wipe off their dripping faces, whisk them away to some Minneapolis or Toronto, and teach them to take pleasure in a simple linear li