Little Failure: A Memoir Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B00HHFPNUI | Format: PDF
Little Failure: A Memoir Description
After three acclaimed novels - The Russian Debutante's Handbook, Absurdistan, and Super Sad True Love Story - Gary Shteyngart turns to memoir in a candid, witty, deeply poignant account of his life so far.
Shteyngart shares his American immigrant experience, moving back and forth through time and memory with self-deprecating humor, moving insights, and literary bravado. The result is a resonant story of family and belonging that feels epic and intimate and distinctly his own. Provocative, hilarious, and inventive, Little Failure reveals a deeper vein of emotion in Gary Shteyngart' s prose. It is a memoir of an immigrant family coming to America, as told by a lifelong misfit who forged from his imagination an essential literary voice and, against all odds, a place in the world.
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 12 hours and 46 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Recorded Books
- Audible.com Release Date: January 7, 2014
- Whispersync for Voice: Ready
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00HHFPNUI
Years before he graduated from our high school alma mater, I met the likes of Gary Shteyngart in the narrow hallways and staircases of that aging, decrepit high school building on East 15th Street; other Garys spending hours smoking pot and drinking beer in the adjoining park named Stuyvesant Square, holding forth on philosophical discussions ranging from Freudian psychoanalysis to a potential nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. Yet none ever wrote memorable prose as graceful or as hilarious as his, blessed with ample wit, sensitivity and observation. Nor can I think of any published former student of acclaimed memoirist Frank McCourt - who had retired from teaching English and creative writing the semester before Shteyngart's arrival - writing anything as outrageously funny about their Stuyvesant High School years as he has done in "Little Failure: A Memoir". (His terse description of earth science teacher John Orna - whom I knew as the faculty advisor of my geology club - is both hilarious and true. Readers who may doubt his humorous affection for Stuyvesant High School should GOOGLE his commencement speech at the Class of 2011's graduation, seeking its YouTube videos.) With the possible exception of Frank McCourt, I can't think of anyone who has written a memoir on an emigrant's experience in the United States as profoundly moving, irresistibly hilarious, and surprisingly insightful; an engrossing saga warranting favorable comparisons not only with McCourt - who was born in Brooklyn, NY, left when he was very young, and didn't return to America until he was nineteen - but especially, Mark Twain, quite possibly American literature's greatest humorist and satirist.
Having read two of Gary Shteyngart's three novels I am not surprised I liked his memoir. I am surprised though how much and how it resonated. The author's early writing reminds me of Henry Fielding's Tom Jones: raucous, and frenetic picaresque romps that excoriate cultural mores, social climbers as well as well as politics and power of all persuasions. Therefore it was with some trepidation I approached Little Failure. It is one thing to skewer the Russian mob, start-ups or upstart pretension; quite another to skewer mom and dad, without seeming to be an ungrateful Ahole. Happily, his memoir works really well. Shteyngart manages to be funny,poignant and unfailingly honest about his parents' and his own failings and importantly, their struggle together.
It would seem hard to raise a son more neurotic or disfunctional than that quintessential Jewish neurotic New Yorker, Woody Allen. Yet Mom and Pop Shtenyngart do so and then some. The recipe for their dubious success reads something like this: start with a son whose gut-wrenching asthma exacerbates your very worst fears for your only child. Toss in a heart-wrenching and culturally dislocating emigration that make you strangers in a strange land, and oh, yeah leave behind most of your mother's family. It is amidst this backdrop that the author recounts hilarious and painful memories: learning English but keeping Russian, attending Hebrew School but sort of despising it, having an accent then not, being a minority, but hating other minorities, and finally having parents who both adore and abuse you.
These two extremes are the crux or the heart of what's the matter in Little Failure. At one end of the gamut are parents who clearly love you.
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