Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart

Misha Vainberg, a "grossly overweight" and rich Russian Jew, is stranded in St. Petersburg, Russia, wanting nothing more than to return to New York to be with his multicultural true love. But he can't get a renewal of his visa, because his gangster father ("the 1,238th-richest man in Russia") has just murdered a business partner from Oklahoma. He journeys to the fictitious Absurdistan, a former part of the Soviet Union, to get a Belgium passport from a corrupt official, only to end up in the middle of a civil war. (SPOILER ALERT) Naive and generous, Misha is seduced into choosing a side, only to find out that the whole war has been engineered by American companies (Halliburton; Kellogg, Root, and Brown), along with the leaders of both sides of the conflict, in an effort to invite an American military presence with attendant Department of Defense money. Things just got out of hand!

I don't know why I didn't like this book more; Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story was one of my 10 Best from last year. The author is satiric and spot-on funny about everything mentioned in the novel, whether it be the sad state of the former Soviet Union, the pretensions of American ultra-liberal arts colleges, American consumerism and the hip-hop culture, or the exploitations by American companies of third-world countries. And he throws in a love story.

First, maybe I don't know enough about the former parts of the Soviet Union to fully appreciate its current situation, and thus truly understand some of the satire. But mainly, I think, the love story (which seems tacked-on) was, to me, totally unbelievable and emotionless. Even Misha did not seem real. One of the quotes on the back compared Shteyngart to Jonathan Swift, and that would seem to me to be accurate. Gulliver was just a literary device to introduce new subjects for Swift to satirize, and that seems to be Misha's role, as well.

My assessment-- this novel was almost all the back of the book promised it to be: "freakishly intelligent, verbally giddy"; "inventive, biting, and comically absurd"; "a Monster Truck Rally of a satire." And yet, to me, it came off flat. The whole thing seemed an intellectual exercise (done very well) without a soul.

Reviews on the back of the book also compared the author to Joseph Heller, and I have to say, I have read Catch 22, and this ain't it.