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    Absurdistan
    Absurdistan
    Absurdistan
    Audiobook12 hours

    Absurdistan

    Written by Gary Shteyngart

    Narrated by Adam Grupper

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Named as one of the New York Times Year's Ten Best upon its publication, Gary Shteyngart's Absurdistan is a biting, poignant satire of American-style democracy and the American Dream. After returning to Russia to attend his father's funeral, 30-year-old Misha is subsequently denied a visa when he attempts to re-enter the United States. What follows is a series of misadventures through the Eastern Bloc in which Misha runs afoul of crooked politicians, businessmen, and bureaucracies all seemingly determined to keep him from his new home country.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateJul 1, 2011
    ISBN9781461804055
    Absurdistan

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    Reviews for Absurdistan

    3.5/5

    636 ratings63 reviews

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    • 3/5
      I heard good things about this and thought that it would be funnier than it was. I saw a lot of people reading this on public transportation when it first came out. So I had high hopes which fell in on itself, much like the Iron Curtain. There was really only one part of this book which I found amusing, which was the satire of the miltiary and war, but frankly there was a lot of buildup for the punchline. Aside from that, I didn't really care too much about the main character or his sexual exploits.
    • 1/5
      i really like you gary shteyngart, but that was sort of excruciating.
    • 4/5
      Farce and satire blended together into a dark mix.
      An excellent read for a certain type of reader who
      has good mix of cynicism and knowledge of world history.
      If you don't, please skip this book and go read about zombies.
    • 3/5
      This author is hilarious, but he's so busy being funny that the narrative of the story suffers. I could only read it in small doses or my mind stayed to drift. His talent is undeniable. I should try his debut. .. The Russian Debutante's Handbook.
    • 1/5
      Wow. Funny? In a sad kind of way. Good? Mmmmm, not really. I enjoy existentialism, the asking about the why life turns out the way it does, but this character has no "Why?" in his vocabulary. He never asks "why me?" or "how can I just change the insanity of my life?," he simply goes on, allowing people to take advantage of his good nature, his money, and his beloved khui till perhaps the very end. That was the moment in the last two pages that he maybe, just maybe, gets a handle on holding his life together. Otherwise, it is more about an absurdly fat man who lives an absurdly wasteful life. Worth reading as it's well-written, but not one of my favorites."
    • 4/5
      I know plenty of upright citizens who would say this is the stupidest book they ever tried to read. However, if you have a dark, cynical, political sense of humor (which those same people would call twisted or sick), then you will probably think this book is as hilarious as I did.

      Misha Vainburg is just trying to find a way back into America and the arms of his Bronx sweetheart, Rouenna. When the grossly rich, grossly obese (and all around gross) expat Jew travels to Absurdvani to buy a Belgian passport (of dubioius legality), he finds himself caught in a bloody revolution (of dubious political and social significance).
    • 3/5
      Funny, but way too much graphic sex...if Shteyngart had kept SOME of the graphic stuff out it would have been a GREAT book. As it is, I can at least say it gave me a lot of LOLs!
      ~Stephanie
    • 4/5
      This book is a satire about what is going on in the world today. Looking at terrible incidents which bear similarities to the World Trade Centre disaster and, the war in Afghanistan through the eyes of our Russian immigrant story teller, Misha. Fueled by alcohol and activan, Misha tells the story of his life with humourous vulgarity and somehow, deep insight. Misha is not a likeable character, but somehow the reader comes to like him. He is a lecherous drunk with a heart of gold. I listened to this book on audio, read by the super talented Arte Johnson (of Laugh-In fame) and I am sure his talent for accents and timing humour made the story come to life. Had I read the book I am sure I would have gotten through it, but not so sure I would have enjoyed it nearly as much. Well worth the listen!
    • 1/5
      i read just a few pages into this before quitting.
      awful book.
      full of itself and just not funny. like a b-movie comedy, this book is unintentionally funny because it tries to be funny in a "look how clever i am!" way. like a child trying desperately to recreate that perfect moment of silliness they experienced last night just before bed out of thin air, this book should have the joke eel meme printed as a watermark on each page.
    • 2/5
      I love absurdism and satire - A Confederacy of Dunces is one of my all time favourite books. But I couldn't stand this one. I so wanted to like it.I rarely leave a book unfinished, but I'm afraid I couldn't bear to continue with this one, despite a few bright moments.
    • 3/5
      Shteyngart had the talent to write a better book, perhaps a very good book (maybe he has done?), but the Americans in this are all wrong, the pastiche tone-deaf as opposed to knowing, especially the poor ones, and the Russians seem pretty sleazy-huckstery-stillweirdlyinnocenty-right, but after the Americans you kind of wonder, and the insistent proactivity with which Shteyngart manages his own rep, cynically knowing that if you write yourself as a fake and a buffoon that it'll charm all the NYC and MFA types who might otherwise hold themselves aloof from the claims of a fresh post-Soviet-global-migrant "the Warsaw Pact writes back" voice that you're selling, that is to say, just flogging PR hackery on a larger scale Shteyngart. And the Central Asians are just bogstandard sheepfuckery really. There are moments of stagy poignancy and I got pretty interested in the big fat sad rich just-wanna-be-loved-if-I-weren't-like-a-mansized-cyst-full-of-everything-that's-wrong-with-the-world-2006 main dude's relationship with his dad. He wanted cuddles from his dead dad and to be told he was pretty so much and a lot would have to go weird before most aspects of my situation with my new son would resemble Boris and Misha Vainberg's but let me tell you though sir that at least my boy will never lack for cuddles and blandishments and I hope he stays a mild to moderate daddy's boy for life and never either trundles idiotically through a gross fake Baudrillardian war like childlike Misha or strikes out on his own and turns into a self-made semi-fraud like how Shteyngart comes across a few too many times here.
    • 3/5
      This book fell way short of my expectations after Super Sad True Love Story and Little Failure. Absurdistan protagonist, Misha Vainberg, is a rich, grotesquely obese Russian I found totally unlikeable. It follows the familiar ugly man only sleeps with beautiful women trope. Sure Rouenna his Latina lover from the Bronx is after his money, but she seems to genuinely like him too for no apparent reason. His later lover Nana Nanabragovna doesn't need his money, so I guess were supposed to believe she using him for political reasons. Whatever. The female characters are one-dimensional sex toys for the most part. Is it too much to ask for some character development in a political satire? I don't think so. I think Shteyngart is up to the task of a complex, humorous, political novel with real characters. Then there's Absurdistan. I fail to understand why I'm supposed to care about this make-believe country's ludicrous politics. It turns out it's all about oil money and post-war contracting money. Blow 'em up so we have to rebuild 'em. And corruption. Everyone is corrupt. But Misha is such a moral relativist he hardly seems to care.So why did I give it even three stars? Well it reads like stand-up comedy sometimes. Shteyngart is really funny. He's like Mr. one-liner. There's some parts about the Jews that are hilarious. To paraphrase since I don't have my copy handy: they polled 30 Jews in a bar in Maryland for name recognition of these basic Jewish concepts: Torah, Mikvah, Talmud, Holocaust, Whitefish, Kabbalah. Only Whitefish scored higher than Holocaust. Proving that a Holocaust museum in Absurdistan would be wildly popular. I'm probably telling it badly, but Shteyngart is funny. I did make it through the whole book despite being sometimes disgusted by Misha and his lovers and sometimes bored by the politics.
    • 4/5
      Hilarious until it flags out near the end.
    • 5/5
      A great book. One of the funniest and strangest and most difficult narrators I've read. Great settings. Interesting characters. Funny, ironic writing. Pathos. Relevance. Subversiveness.
    • 2/5
      audiobook - ick. I listened to this almost all day today because I just wanted to get it OVER WITH. I love Russian novels, and the points the author tries to make are worthwhile. Russia is run by corrupt gangsters. The fall of the Soviet Union left a vacuum which is being filled by corruption loosely disguised as Capitalism. Corrupt people are corrupt. US Department of Defense contracting companies are corrupt (I feel like I should take personal offense to that . . .). Europe is corrupt. Corruption.Misha is a 350 pound secular Jew with half a penis who is the son of a rich Russian (i.e. gangster) and lives in NYC with his trashy girlfriend he met at a "titty bar". He goes back to St. Petersburg for his father's birthday only to find out that his father has murdered a US citizen and thus the entire family is forbidden from getting a US visa. Some spoiler-y stuff happens, then Misha devises a plan to get back to the US. He has a friend who has a friend who knows the super, super corrupt Belgian ambassador to Absurdistan (a fictional former Soviet state "next to Iran"). Misha travels to Absurdistan and meets with the ambassador who gives Misha a Belgian passport in exchange for a buttload of money. And then a civil war breaks out between two the Orthodox Christian sects that comprise the population (they're fighting over whether Jesus' footrest on the cross should tilt to the left or the right), and Misha can't leave Absurdistan. While he is stuck there, he learns all about their country. They're basically run by Halliburton (the US defense contracting company), which is corrupt. Misha is taken in by a rich "Absurdi" family; they're corrupt too. The end.There are much better ways to get these messages across. Misha is unlikable and unrelatable and I really could not make myself care about him or his problems. And I really, really, really could have done without the copious descriptions of Misha's half-amputated, infected penis. Thanks.
    • 2/5
      So far, this seems like a weak adaptation of Confederacy of Dunces, although I wonder how much of that is due to having a physically repulsive main character. Misha, unsurprisingly, isn't nearly as interesting as Ignatius.

      And including a thinly-veiled version of himself in the book isn't really making me think too highly of Shteyngart. It seems as though he's trying to be clever for the sake of being clever.

      That said, I'm only a little way into the book; still too soon for judgment.

      *****

      Now that I'm almost finished, I feel comfortable saying that I just didn't like this. It has definitely picked up towards the end, and I really wish the rest of the book had remained focused on a satire of American foreign policy, but instead, Shteyngart chose to focus on Misha.

      It's not that he's unlikeable or strains credulity (although both are true). The real problem with Misha is that ... I just don't care about him. He's been slathered with "personality" but he's got no soul. He just feels like a pastiche of other, and better, characters, taking baby steps towards being a little bit heroic on one page and baby steps towards being a little bit outrageous on the next.

      Because of how dull he is as a character, the book just feels like an unnecessarily long setup to the civil war, which takes far too long to "reveal" what is perfectly obvious from the get-go: the the whole situation is manufactured so that a few people can make money at the expense of the suffering of the majority.

      To truly succeed, this book would have needed to commit to being just one thing: an outrageous character piece, a coming-of-age story, a cutting social commentary ... something. Instead, it just feels like a mish-mash that never really gets going.
    • 3/5
      Absurd, yes. Compelling storyline, no.
    • 4/5
      The clever satiric writing earned it three stars for me and the story, location, etc, was enough to put it over to four for me. Was it "Catch 22"? Not quite, but quality satires are hard to come by of late!
    • 4/5
      I approached this with some reservations, partly on account of the title. The dark, brash humour of the prologue won me over immediately, however, and some way into the read I realised the extent to which this book effectively draws on the rich traditions of savage wit and satire. The first sections have distinct Rabelaisian shades, with the narrator (a modern-day Gargantua in the form of a drunk Russian Jew) undergoing adult circumcision in a Hasidic clinic in Brooklyn. Later, this moves into more explicitly political waters reminiscent of Jonathan Swift, and it is surely no coincidence that a satirical vision of how the Holocaust may be rebranded for a new generation takes one of Swift's own titles, 'A Modest Proposal'. The imagery in much of the book is powerfully physical, which suits the narrator, dwelling much on his twin pleasures of food and sex. Furthermore, the understated ending, given the clear signals to what happens afterwards, packs a deceptive punch.
    • 3/5
      I wish I could say I liked this one more than I did. Shteyngart puts on a virtuoso performance here in the funny, observational, hyper-referential and very contemporary mode of someone like, say, Zadie Smith. He's got Smith's transnational sensibility, too, building his novel around an obese, fabulously wealthy Russian Jew who feels American down to his very bones but finds himself marooned in a third-world backwater with a slightly improbable name. Shteygart's prose is so polished in gleams, his narrator's voice always rings true, and the book's soul is truly global. The author seems to understand both why so many young people around the world find the United States and its cultural products so alluring and why so many privileged young Americans are so fascinated by the hardscrabble existences of people further down the socioeconomic ladder, and that's no mean feat. Our millionaire protagonist eats caviar by the jarful and raps unselfconsciously while a young Russian he meets says he wants to travel to New York "to play basketball with blacks on the street." For Shteyngart, it's just another day on planet earth. Shyteyngart's novel is perhaps most touching when tracing these weird cultural mix-ups. Improbably enough, "Absurdistan has some of the most delicious descriptions of New York in the summertime that I've ever read, and Shteyngart has a keen eye for the weird, dissonant juxtapositions that unbridled global capitalism can create. I've been told that post-Soviet humor is surreal, and, if that's true, the author gets the tone just right. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that he did his own research by spending some time in go-go post-Lenin St. Petersburg, and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that he's got a genuine preference for voluptuous women of color. The two he includes here, Nana, an Absurdi beauty, and Rouenna, a Latina stunner from New York, are flat-out gorgeous, and perhaps the hottest fictional women I've met since I clapped eyes on Molly Bloom. You just can't fake a love like that. Still, it's the novel's relentless physicality that more or less ruins it for me. The body in text is one of my personal obsessions, but even I found the author's frequent descriptions of Misha's elephantine, sweat-drenched body and unstoppable appetites hard to take. I don't, like some readers, have to necessarily like the characters I read about, but Misha's egotism and frankly adolescent worldview grew tiresome. The author probably made the right move when he chose to make this point by penning a clever satire instead of a ponderous, hand-wringing book of essays, but did he have to make it so grotesque? I don't know what I'm reading next, but I hope that none of its male characters refer to their "tits" half as often as Misha does. Eesh. I felt like I needed a shower and a diet plan after I reached the last page of "Absurdistan," and while that might mean that Shteyngart's book was effective, I'm still not sure that it was enjoyable as it should have been. In the final analysis, "Absurdistan" isn't really about the fictional country it borrows its title from, or even about Russia. Shteygart's argument here is that thanks to globalization, we're all more or less citizens of Absurdistan, and that Misha's really much more American than he knows. What to do about it, though? At times, Shteyngart seems to be challenging the educated left-leaning readers that he knew would be his most likely audience: he mocks Misha's lazy, facile education in multiculturalism, for example. At the same time, I'm not sure that his caricatures of American contract workers and the book's twist ending are too far from the average MSNBC editorial. Shteyngart is, again, at his best when he writes about New York and considers what really being a global citizen might mean. The book ends with this line, and you might want to stop reading here if you haven't finished it: "Have faith in me. On these cruel, fragrant streets we will finish the difficult lives we were given." Now that there is some heart-stopping word-slinging. Misha, Gary – right on, brother.
    • 1/5
      It may be unfair to rate a book on only 10 pages read, but I feel like I dodged a bullet by stopping there. Unfunny, annoying, and trying to hard are ways I'd describe this one.
    • 3/5
      I enjoyed this, but the similarities to Dunces' Ignatius J. Reilly are just a bit too plain for me to put aside. He's incredibly fat, he's got an unlikely love, he's got sexual issues, he's a misanthrope, etc... Very well written, laugh out loud funny in some spots, but still a bit too derivative for a higher rating. Three stars.
    • 3/5
      I thought that a "Super Sad True Love Story" was a much better book. I agree with some of the lower ratings for this book. Misha was not a character that I could connect to.I certainly would not compare this book to " A Confederacy of Dunces". I do admire the authors humor and creativity but the book is one that would not stick with me. I will try to read his first novel now that I have read one very good and one so so book by him.
    • 3/5
      A very funny mix of pathos and bathos, but also a book written with accelerator pressed completely to the floor. Steyngart goes over the top at all times, which provides magnificent flourishes and set pieces, but also accounts the book's flaws (too much graphic fat guy sex, a problematic last five chapters). But in general, it works: this is a hilarious novel which is also genuinely affecting. This work also demonstrates my beloved theme of impotence in the modern novel, but a gross, incapable millionaire protagonist is a more elegant device for illustrating this theme than the usual disaffected yuppies.Rap empowers everyone it touches
    • 3/5
      I read this book a few years ago. I don't remember all that much about it, I am sad to say. I know that I enjoyed it quite a bit. It was very funny.
    • 2/5
      I did not care for this book. I felt the humor was quite juvenile and the characters not interresting. I got very tired of hearing about body parts, especially Misha's botched circumcision. I had hoped to gain some insight into recent Russian immigrants, but I didn't.
    • 4/5
      Having read Shteyngart's latest novel not so long ago made me want to re-read this very funny but very satiric novel. Back in Israel, I had enough time for that and found it as great as I did the first time. I love his dark and self-deprecating humor and how his satire spares no one.
    • 4/5
      Misha Vainberg, a 325 pound Russian Jew, is the son of the 1,238th richest man in Russia. Sent in 1990 by his Beloved Papa to get his education at the American Accidental College ("located deep in the country's interior and safe from the gay distractions of the eastern and western seaboards"), Misha majored in multicultural studies, ate Doritos and Oreos and Cheetos and pizza, smoked dope, learned to rap ("My name is Vainberg/I like ho's/Sniff 'em out/Wid my Hebrew nose"), and picked up the nickname "Snack Daddy." Eventually, he ended up in Brooklyn. Misha is truly, madly, deeply in love with all things American. He's in love with American music and American people, especially the black and brown people of Brooklyn, with American smells and American food, and--most of all--he's in love with the large, street smart Rouenna.But, as his story opens in June of 2001, Misha has been exiled back to Russia, far, far from all that he loves. Beloved Papa has killed--whacked, in the appropriate gangster parlance--an Oklahoma businessman, making Misha persona non grata in the States. But when Beloved Papa is himself murdered in turn, Misha sees his chance to leave the country he hates, and embarks on his quest to return to America. A Belgian passport is to be had, he's told, from a corrupt Belgian official who is posted in the oil rich country of Absurdvani. Run by Halliburton, on the verge of civil war (its two warring religious sects disagree as to which side the footrest in the image of Jesus on the cross should be), Absurdistan is a country desperately trying to fit itself into the twenty-first century. When war breaks out Misha is tapped as Minister of Multicultural Affairs and assigned the task of enlisting Israel's aid. Ultimately--in September of the year, and on the eve of the event that will change the country he loves forever--Misha must escape Absurdistan (and on an American Express train, yet).Absurdistan is, well, absurd. It's also kind of wonderful, in a self-referential, self-conscious, post-modern, farcical way. Misha is the literary love child of Ignatius Reilly and Tyrone Slothrop, a blobby self-centered slob, who wants to do good but mostly wants to do good for himself, who is strangely attractive to women, who is paradoxically simultaneously hyper-aware of and utterly unaware of himself as he stumbles through the the war torn and often hallucinatory landscape (which, it must be noted, is quite the homage to Pynchon's bombed out Europe in Gravity's Rainbow). Absurdistan is brilliantly written and frequently hilarious--often uncomfortably so. However, in the end one is left feeling somewhat cold, and a little unsatisfied.
    • 2/5
      Avoid, avoid, avoid. It is very well possible that I was missing some exquisitely subtle irony, but I thought it was course, unfunny, and (at 233 pages) too lon
    • 3/5
      I heard good things about this and thought that it would be funnier than it was. I saw a lot of people reading this on public transportation when it first came out. So I had high hopes which fell in on itself, much like the Iron Curtain. There was really only one part of this book which I found amusing, which was the satire of the miltiary and war, but frankly there was a lot of buildup for the punchline. Aside from that, I didn't really care too much about the main character or his sexual exploits.