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    Super Sad True Love Story
    Super Sad True Love Story
    Super Sad True Love Story
    Audiobook13 hours

    Super Sad True Love Story

    Written by Gary Shteyngart

    Narrated by Adam Grupper and Ali Ahn

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Gary Shteyngart, author of The Russian Debutante's Handbook, creates a compelling reality in this tale about an illiterate America in the not-too-distant future. Lenny Abramov may just be penning the world's last diary. Which is good, because while falling in love with a rather unpleasant woman and witnessing the fall of a great empire, Lenny has a lot to write about.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateJul 27, 2010
    ISBN9781449821401
    Super Sad True Love Story

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    Reviews for Super Sad True Love Story

    4/5

    68 ratings55 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Strange. I’m not sure I’d recommend it but the writing style was fun and creative.
    • 4/5
      Shteyngart is clever and articulate and this novel is a very satisfying read. There are passages so beautiful that you keep going back to them, passages that especially contrast with all the exposition chat and emails that punctuate the book. The sad and scary future that Shteyngart has many of our current obsessions (shopping, handhelds, social media, borrowing) culminate in, is fascinating and believable. The love interest at the center though, Eunice Park, is a character so flat and uninteresting that it is impossible to feel Lenny's attraction to her. But that is okay - if I thought about it long enough I would probably understand why Shteyngart has Lenny investing himself so deeply in waters so shallow.
    • 4/5
      I had really high hopes for this novel. The fusion of love story and near-future satire held appeal, and the lure of positive media reviews pulled me in. While I appreciated Shteyngart's satirical vision of a United States whose extended credit and Internet-bred illiteracy cause it to degenerate into an unstable police state at the financial mercy of the Chinese, the love story between Lenny Abramov and and Eunice Park proved somewhat plotless, unconvincing and unsatisfying. I got the whole connection the author drew between their Russian and Korean immigrant families, and the common familial work ethic pressuring them to realize the fleeting American dream, but the love connection seemed little more than a contrived set-up for inevitable disappointment. The plot, too, was underwhelming, as Sheteyngart seemed content riffing on the absurd trends of the media-driven day, like the ubiquitous credit poles that constantly display citizens' credit ratings as a measure of their value to society, rating everyone's hotness on the apparat devices that connect all citizens and provide access to vast amounts of personal data, and pursuing all forms of life-extension treatments to deny acknowledging one's mortality. Lenny's boss, the seventy-year-old Joshie Goldmann, a walking charicature of the life-extension obsession, worked as a super-father figure and ultimate romantic foil, but the conflict generated by Joshie and the collapse of the American economy failed to propel the plot forward with sufficient force. The ending, in its attempt to portray a novel based on Lenny's diary entries and Eunice's e-mail correspondence as the savior of traditional literary values, also had a hollow ring to it. This is an imaginative author and hopefully his next novel will pay more heed to the dying literary qualities he seems to value.
    • 4/5
      *** Spoiler Alert ***Honest unflinching view of a future America where the need for increased security tramples all over basic human rights for its citizens. The love story of the title is actually affecting and realistic especially in its ending. Very readable.
    • 2/5
      Lenny Abramov falls in love with Eunice Park one night in Rome at the end of a long vacation/work trip. He convinces her to come back to US and stay with him in NYC. Their romance buds as the political landscape becomes more volatile. In the end Lenny loses his love of his life. Super Sad True Love Story is set in the future where everyone is addicted to this handheld device called apparat. This device shares information about the owner and other people and allows folks to rate themselves real-time. The book goes between diary entries of Lenny and GlobalTeen (like Facebook) messages from Eunice's account. The author clearly has opinions about how technology and public opinion influence our daily lives. I'm not sure I understood all the pretexts and found the book to be overall strange.
    • 1/5
      Alexandra wrote:This could have been an interesting satirical look at where the self-centeredness created by social networking might take us, but instead this book is entirely about Shteyngart's ego. It's hard not to see the connections between the author and his protagonist -- even if Lenny's NYC-dwelling, Russian-immigrant background and eventual fame as a writer (all autobiographical details of Shteyngart's life) don't tip you off the way the story sets him up as the last intellectual, mocked by all for his tendency to spend his money on paper books is all too telling. Shteyngart tries to offset it by making his protagonist pathetic -- unattractive, decaying (and obsessed with his own mortality), faintly unsuccessful. But he still somehow gets the girl -- Eunice, a beautiful but vapid 24-year-old Korean-American post-grad, the very image of youth.I can speak from experience -- 39-year-old men do (very much) like to hit on girls in their early 20s, and if you're dumb enough to give one of them your number before you get away, they do tend to send a neverending streams of texts, no matter how long you try to ignore them. That much was realism, but since, in this case, the old dude was the one with the pen, Eunice ends up moving in with Lenny (?) because she feels sorry for him (??), trying to change him (no ?s here), finding herself drawn to him (???), and falling in love with him (????). Her shifts in attitude are uneven and incomprehensible, but, frankly, so is the entire character -- Shteyngart doesn't seem to have any interest in developing her beyond "young, pretty, and a little bit dumb". It takes a real creep to call this a love story. Unfortunately, you can FEEL that in every bit of this book -- god knows how I managed to finish this one.I agree entirely with this review. The story did not grab me at all and I found the characters boring and unrelatable. I've read in many places how hilarious this book is supposed to be, but I don't see it. I also feel like the image of the future in this book is the same old crying and bitching of people who can't deal with change. The future world was completely ridiculous. Not reading this again.
    • 5/5
      just loved this unputdownable, ingenious, dystopian novel-- It's the near future-- citizens rarely "verbal" with one another, all prefer to text and stream and shop and rate(fuckability ratings for all are a fun way to pass the time at a bar!) and research on their apparats. Everyone's credit rating flashes in public view--all are encouraged to shop and spend. Women are wearing see-through "onion skin" jeans and nippleless bras that they purchase from AssLuxury. And yet in the midst of this (foreseeable) hilarity, there is the sweetest character I've ever known in print. Lenny Abramov, 39-years old and nearing death, works for a cell-regeneration company that can guarantee immortality to the very rich and very highly credit ranked. (Sadly, he doesn't qualify) And Lenny falls in love. Oh, Lenny, Oh, Lenny, Oh, LennyI highly recommend Super Sad True Love Story. (I've decided on a half star deduction from the full 5 stars because certain aspects of the story like otters and details of finance left me a tad bewildered. But, this book warrants a second reading, so I'm sure I'll come away with a full understanding next time)
    • 3/5
      I recognize this as literature, but it wasn't to my taste. I found Shteyngart's view of where culture and internet is going to be a little too bleak, and not quite humanized enough. For the satire to hit home more strongly, I think that I needed to care more about the characters than I did. Still, it was quite funny at times, and well written throughout.
    • 3/5
      vulgar, weird, occasionally delightful, cautionary?
    • 4/5
      Not as good as Absurdistan - somewhat stretched - but still remarkable. The future is all too imaginable.
    • 3/5
      The time is the near future, as in possibly next week. Lenny Abramov, a thirty-nine year-old New Yorker and the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, is balding and visibly going grey, neither short nor tall at five foot nine, and going soft around the middle. He's a salesman for Post-Human Services, a company which offers miraculous rejuvenation treatments and eternal life to HNWIs (high net worth individuals) and is obsessed with the fact that he can't afford the treatments for himself. America is now a police state and bankrupt, with the devaluated dollar pegged to the Chinese yuan. The only thing more important than being young and beautiful in this society is having a good line of credit, being an active consumer and being plugged into the latest model äppärät at all times. A futuristic smart-phone-like device which, presumably to reflect how much room it takes in people's lives, also takes lots of room in the novel, the äppärät allows strangers to view each others personal information and history, including the all-important credit ranking, places of study, employment and residence, sexual preferences, and desirability score, actually referred to as 'f***ability score', in keeping with the general unsubtle attitude toward sex in this society. To wit, the latest fashions include nipple-less bras and 'onionskin jeans' which leave nothing to the imagination. The only thing that Lenny loves more than his 740 square-feet condo in downtown Manhattan and its wall of books—now out of print since nobody reads anymore—is Eunice Parks, a beautiful, slender, superficial and cruel twenty-four year-old Korean girl. Undeterred by the continuous jibes she throws his way about being a nerd and an unattractive loser, our sweet-natured Lenny is convinced that he can help Eunice become a kinder and gentler person simply by loving her with everything he's got. The book is told from their individual point of view, with Lenny's diary entries alternating with transcripts of Eunice's personal incoming and outgoing communications with her mother and sister, and also her best friend, whom she affectionately calls names most appropriately used in porno-speak, which is apparently the way all young people communicate with each other in a society where pornography has been completely assimilated into the mainstream. Things become dangerous when bands of LNWI (low net worth individuals) try to mount an uprising and are violently quashed by the national guard and the whole country enters in a state of emergency. I'm having a hard time deciding what I thought about this book. There's no question that it was entertaining. No question either that it was disturbing, as it was intended to be, with Shteyngart describing a future which is not that far removed from the realm of likely possibilities. It was slow going as far as the reading of it went, in large part because of the language used, with countless expressions and acronyms that are a common mode of communication in a visuals-driven society where 'talking' is now referred to as 'verballing'. This book was given to me as a Christmas present along with a gift receipt in case I didn't find it to be quite my thing, and take this as you will, but I've decided to take advantage of the store's generous no-questions-asked return policy and exchange it for something that I'm likely to find ultimately more satisfying. I was going to give a lower rating, but gave this book three stars in the end because of the sheer entertainment factor.
    • 5/5
      My first book by Shteyngart and I give it 5 stars for its' inventiveness and the way it takes our current situation in America and extends it to a possible logical conclusion. As my view point is of one from the upper end of the baby boomer generation, I tend to see our current social network takeover as a possible negative thing. Gary creates an extensive world of language etc. that alone gives the book a high rating. I always find it interesting that people give negative ratings to books where they dislike the characters. The fact that you can dislike a character says a lot about the authors ability to at least create something real that you can dislike. For those people that have trouble with our current state of affairs, I highly recommend this book. My only negative was the epilogue which took a long period of time and summarized it very quickly. It was as if Shteyngart ran out of energy to find a more creative ending to the novel. A minor point. I will certainly read his previous novels.
    • 5/5
      This book reminds me of both Brothers by Yu Hua and The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera, which Shteyngart mentions in the course of the story. This book shares with the other two books a similar sense of confusion and similarly well-meaning main characters hurtling towards disaster. I found Super Sad True Love Story to be pleasantly disorienting; it was just similar enough to present day to leave me in a mildly confused state about what was Shteyngart's dystopia and what was the real world (I remain confident in my ability to tell fiction from reality, it's just a mild surface fog through which I find it pleasant to rise in the course of my daily reveries).

      I read a review that said that Shteyngart had used George W Bush's America as a jumping-off point for the world of this book. While I did see similar abbreviations of personal liberties that reminded me of the Patriot Act, Shteyngart's world extends well beyond the political. It took many elements of current society to their logical and often absurd conclusions, elements which include the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, our growing reliance on electronic media and social networks for interpersonal interaction, and the current US recession and housing market implosion. It's also got a fatalistic edge to it. Even when a revolution does occur, those that take over are just the same as those who were in charge before. The new world is largely indistinguishable from the old. The only thing that's changed is the names of the major players and the wording of their rhetoric.

      I also see it as something of a cautionary tale about what could happen if we continue to rely more and more on the quick, opinion-based media that seems to be attending the demise of traditional reporting and print media. As a newly minted blogger and erstwhile Facebook addict, I took this warning very much to heart. Perhaps that's why I stayed up until 3am wrestling with my temperamental booklight to finish this book.
    • 4/5
      This super funny love story set in a dystopian world may well be Shteyngart’s best yet. I’ve always enjoyed his funny, satiric writing in previous novels but this is truly more than that. While he starts with taking familiar trends to ridiculous, funny extremes, as the novel progresses you see his talented writing goes well beyond satire. Reminded me of how Chekhov's short stories begin as comedy but then can break your heart revealing just enough of the true feelings behind the characters. Must be a Russian thing :o)
    • 4/5
      I've been reading indie authors recently and the hoopla around Shteyngart didn't quite seem believable to me. As soon as i finished this book, I picked up one of his earlier books. Amazing writer, and the genre is right up my alley.
    • 5/5
      My five star rating is the average of six stars for sheer inventiveness of a world and exuberance of language. And four stars for the ability to sustain it over the course of a novel.Super Sad True Love Story is set about 50 years in the future. The world is a super extreme version of aspects of ours. American has been reduced to three industries (Credit -- where men aspire to work, Retail -- where women aspire to work, and Media -- which is largely individuals live streaming their lives). Everyone carries around an iPhone-like device and spends most of their time social networking, ranking each other, shopping on line, etc. Occasionally they take a break from this to "verbal" with a friend. America lurches from financial crisis to financial crisis as corporations, foreign governments, and sovereign wealth funds all swoop in to take over. And the super-rich are becoming "post-humans" thanks to life extending treatments that promise immortality.Set against this backdrop, the novel tells a love story in chapters that alternate between Lenny Abramov, a schlubby Jewish intellectual aspiring to immortality, and emails and chats from his much younger Korean girlfriend, Eunice Park. Both narrators are somewhat unreliable and the story moves along reasonably well, as the world around them disintegrates and a predictable triangle in their relationship appears.The writing is hilarious and amazingly inventive, but has diminishing returns -- although never turning negative. And the plot is a decent enough scaffolding and keeps you interested from beginning to end. Overall, one of the best books of the year.
    • 4/5
      Excellent writing. Innovative narrative and situations. Interesting social commentary.
    • 5/5
      Can't understand the negative reviews of this book - I loved it and thought it was so much better than Absurdistan which I felt became completely ridiculous after a certain point. Super Sad is an incisive look at a near future where China is the world's biggest superpower and where people judge their value and that of others based on their 'hotness' and their credit ratings. I found this satirical novel extremely funny but also dangerously near to what I think might happen in the world in the future. Super Sad was one of the best books I read in 2012.
    • 3/5
      A lot better than I expected.
    • 1/5
      Lots of buzz about this book. Honestly, there was nothing really bad about it. But it just wasn't for me. We're in the near future, and it's a big deal that America is now near the bottom of the economic totem pole, people really don't talk and are always fiddling with their iPhone/Facebook/technology devices rather than talking to each other, and Big Brother is back, baby. Kind of true, but just because it's an extension of the truth doesn't make it fascinating. I like my futures either totally awesome or complete shit. Jetsons or the Road. The idea that we will be doing basically the same shit in the future, just with better resolution and faster connections, is very likely, very realistic, and highly uninteresting. After awhile I was reading a couple pages and saying, "Yeah, I get it. We are still assholes in the future, and we still don't really want to talk to anyone and still sort of do. Message received. Let's have a story now."
    • 5/5
      Super sad, super satirical—it’s just SUPER!At one point when I was reading this disturbing satirical look at a possible American future, I just thought, “Wait! How did we get there from here? How did we get from the America I know to a totalitarian nation on the verge of financial and political collapse?” And in the next moment, unbidden, I thought, “It’s a totally logical projection.”Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story is provoking some strong responses. It’s polarizing. It’s disturbing. It IS funny, but you know how humor is, so subjective. What I find uproarious, you’ll find imbecilic. As a great man said, “So it goes.” Perhaps one of the reasons the novel is so provocative is that despite the absurd humor and the extremity of Shteyngart’s vision, his satirical eye is dead on. He’s got us pegged.As for the plot, it’s an epistolary novel, a romance related from the pages of Lenny Abramov’s diary and Eunice Park’s emails and instant messages. Poor, sweet, neurotic Lenny. He’ll never be the best looking guy in the room, but he has other redeeming qualities. He’s kind, sincere, loving, fiscally responsible, a reader and a thinker. Unfortunately, 39-year-old Lenny lives in an aggressively vulgar and illiterate culture that is obsessed with youth, beauty, and consumerism. The object of his affection is the much younger, much hotter Eunice. It’s an unlikely match, but I was actually touched as the relationship progressed, all the while fearing for Lenny’s tender heart.There is so much I could write about this novel! The fact that Lenny works in the indefinite life preservation industry, based on the idea that if you’re rich enough you never have to die. His boss, Joshie Goldman, is a post-adolescent septuagenarian. The fact that LNWI (Low Net Worth Individuals) have formed a tent city in Central Park, and there are armed National Guardsmen all over the New York. The very idea of privacy is essentially a thing of the past. Everyone wears a device that simultaneously connects them online and broadcasts the most intimate details of their lives, and people—lliterally—feel they can’t live without the constant stream of data. The dystopian near future that Shteyngart has created is so rich and fully realized and so worthy of contemplation and discussion. I can barely touch on the ideas he explores in a few paragraphs. It is worth mentioning just how strong his writing is as well. Even in the midst of the tortured language used by his characters, I found his prose to be a joy to read. There were interesting subtleties to the end of the novel, and I’m not completely sure I understood everything. Rather than weaken the ending, I find this to be a strength. I’ll be pondering Eunice’s decisions for some time, and look forward to discussing the end with friends. Yeah, this one’s going to stick with me for a while.
    • 4/5
      This romance/satire is set in a near future whose elements read like a catalog of America's worst domestic fears from the past decade or so: economic collapse, unemployment, progression from governmental security-mania to a full-blown police state, a complete lack of privacy, a near lack of literacy, social media gone mad, corporations gone mad, rampant militarism, shameful failure to Support Our Troops, problems with immigrants, problems for immigrants, political unrest, owing our souls to the Chinese, and, of course, the ever-present, neurosis-inducing possibility of each of us growing old and fat.I have terribly mixed feelings about this book. On the negative side -- and it's a pretty hard-to-ignore negative -- are the main characters, Lenny and Eunice. She's shallow, he's a born loser, and their love story is less "super sad" and more just plain pathetic, based as it is almost entirely on mutual neediness and low self-esteem. I know complaining about this may seem like missing the point, as I'm sure we're meant to identify with their human weaknesses and to long for them to grow to the point where they're capable of something more mature. But that's a bit difficult when when you find yourself actively disinclined to extend the characters any sympathy. This really shouldn't have happened, as Lenny, at least, is a character I ought to be able to relate to. He's a bookish, thoughtful person in a world where those things aren't valued, and that's a pretty good description of my life back in junior high. Unfortunately, though, when we first meet him, he's cultivating a creepy, vaguely stalkerish obsession with Eunice in the wake of a tawdry and unsatisfying one-night stand, making a conscious and concentrated effort to refocus his entire life around a self-serving fantasy version of a woman he barely knows. Then he badgers her to come to him, despite her obvious lack of interest, until she finally gives in just because she needs a place to stay. And, yeah... I don't care how common this sort of thing is in literature, for me it's disturbing and unpleasant in a way that there's just really no recovering from. Ever. It doesn't matter how much Shteyngart later tries to portray Lenny as really rather romantic and sweet, in his own dorkish way. As far as I'm concerned it falls on deaf ears, and any possible connection or empathy I might have felt for the guy is dead before it's begun.Remarkably enough, though, Shteyngart actually makes a pretty good run at writing a book I'm capable of truly enjoying despite my principled distaste for the main characters. From the very first page, I was delighted by the liveliness and intelligence of the writing and impressed by the deftness of the satire, which manages to blend a little bit of the pleasantly ridiculous with a whole lot of the frighteningly plausible. The novel almost managed to support itself on the strength of that alone for about a hundred pages or so, but, alas, eventually it reached the point where the freshness started to wear off and I began to feel impatient with it. It did get better towards the end, when the plot gains some unexpected heft, but sadly it never did quite recapture that initial charm. Which is somewhat frustrating, because I can easily imagine a version of this story that I would have loved unreservedly.
    • 2/5
      Some of the gags in this story about our dystopian near-future were slightly amusing. Otherwise, I couldn't have continued reading the 100 pages I did manage to finish before I gave up.
    • 4/5
      Provoking ideas with Apparats, the way people rank each other's fuckability instantly, the things like credit poles, totalsurrender ot Onionskin jeans.. And for Eunice and Lenny.. They are pretty self occupied people and their love, if it really was love, is not super sad true but rather super depressing.
    • 4/5
      Super Sad True Love Story is set in a dystopian near-future USA. I found it most interesting and engaging as a satire of some of the extreme implications of materialism, social media, constant connectedness, and the global financial crisis.

      The actual ‘love story’ had less impact for me, partly because of the main character, Lenny. While I understand that Lenny was intended to be old-school and out of touch with the society he lived in, at times his naivety was not credible. Was it meant to be so completely obvious that those texts were not from Nettie Fine at all, or was it just me?

      Overall, an entertaining and thought-provoking read.
    • 4/5
      The love story takes place in a believable, near-future. Lenny, an older gentleman by the book’s standard at 39, falls deeply in love with young Eunice—who isn’t interested. She later decides to “try to make it work” for the convenience of having a place to live in New York. Through the entire story, Eunice treats Lenny poorly and he pathetically tries to build a hopeless relationship. This isn’t the sad part of the story, however.The love story is really just a façade for the underlying political, social and economic turmoil that eventually leads to the fall of the US to Venezuela and its award to our main debt holders of China and Norway. What was really frightening is how realistic and plausible the situations presented in the book are today.The prime jobs are in “media” or “credit.” Everyone’s entire sense of worth is based on either how popular they are or how much Yen they have in the bank. Credit poles are placed throughout the city so everyone knows each other’s total net worth which is displayed as you pass. Everyone also carries an apparati (think miniaturized smart phone) which continually feeds a stream of information and rates people they come in contact with in regards to worth and sex appeal. The device also connects to an online service called GlobalTeens that everyone, regardless of age, uses as their main communication tool. This is an obvious jab at Facebook which was started for college students but has now become a world-wide communication platform. While everyone remains self absorbed in their looks, bank account and social standing, few notice the decay of the government and society around them. Citizens are subjected to random searches and bureaucratic hurdles often marked by a sign that states that they must “deny its existence and imply consent.”The author is incredibly skilled with words and uses them to evoke mixed emotions which leads to an unsettling atmosphere. Even if the story doesn’t sound interesting, read it for the sheer quality of the writing.
    • 4/5
      Really, really great. It is dystopian satire, but I don't think it's all that far-fetched, scarily enough. Also, I think the "love story" is actually about all the characters, not just the central couple. So, that's my 30-second review.
    • 3/5
      Promising, but becomes tiresome
    • 5/5
      This is a very funny story taking place in the somewhat near future. Lenny Abramov is the Jewish child of Russian immigrants. He works in the Post-Human Services division of a major corporation, selling eternal life to High Net Worth Individuals who pass the eligibility criteria. A scientific process has been developed to allow people to live forever. Lenny is in Italy at the beginning of the story, but about to return to his home in New York. He meets Eunice Park, a recent college grad 15 years his junior, whose parents are Korean immigrants, and he immediately falls desperately in love with her. She is not really interested at first (and for quite a while after), finding him somewhat disgusting really, but they have a brief liaison. He keeps in touch by email after he is back in NYC, and she eventually moves in with him when she returns home because of family issues and has no where else to stay. But she eventually does have real love for him. Of course, the title gives the end away somewhat, at least for their relationship.This is a satire on our society's present state, skewering its focus on youth and attractiveness and on being connected. In this future, everyone is constantly connected electronically, through their äppäräti. America is on the decline and at war with Venezuela. China is ascendant.
    • 4/5
      This book feels eerily like a foreshadowing of the future, or atleast one of the futures we are heading towards. One where the phrase Invasion of Privacy seems truly archaic, and where the broadcast of one's self is expected to be relentless in its frankness as well as its frequency. And in the midst of this, there is a love story which feels doomed from its very birth. It almost seems like the author knowingly presents such a future which one can relate to, where things are dire, and where the love story feels entirely fated to failure, and presents it in the certainty that the reader will still read with that unquenchable Hope for the people and the world they inhabit. That's the essence of every tragedy, where the destiny is fated, but the journey is made with hope in the future nevertheless. Superb book.