We don’t believe in God or the prospect of an afterlife mostly, so we know that we’re only given eighty summers or so per lifetime, and each one has to be better than the last, has to encompass a trip to that arts centre up at Bard, a seemingly mellow game of badminton over at some yahoo’s Vermont cottage, and a cool, wet, slightly dangerous kayak trip down an unforgiving river. Otherwise, how would you know that you have lived your summertime best?
The Book Pile is the increasingly mountainous heap that lives underneath – and increasingly alongside – my bedroom mirror. It is more likely to be supplemented with new purchases and loaners from friends than conquered in my lifetime.
Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart
978-1847082497, Granta (2011)
You know that old saying, that you should never judge a book by its cover? I had a friend once who was happy to embrace the opposite as true. I mean, when you think about it, what else have you got to go on – the back cover blurb? I like to take my cynical marketing head off to consider the point: if the author has written something you would want to read then (s)he’s more likely to have chosen a cover design you’d be attracted to, right? And then, with the cynical marketing head on: if you’re the type of reader who would be attracted to the contents then a smart marketing department would know how to pitch the cover art, surely?
I have a similar rule: sometimes, I judge books by their titles. I see them like album titles: a summation, a statement of intent. Super Sad True Love Story ended up on my wishlist because somebody else – I think one of you – was reading it. I liked the sound of it, because true love stories tend to be super sad ones. I picked it up in an airport terminal because I’d forgotten the book I had planned to read next, and the person behind the counter knew exactly where to look for it because it had been staring at her for the past couple of months.
Super Sad True Love Story unsurprisingly has as its centre a love story between 39-year-old Lenny Abramov, salesman of eternal youth at a price and the world’s last pen-to-paper diarist; and his young paramour, Eunice Park. Lenny hardly meshes with his youth-chasing coworkers and social-networking-to-extremes friends – he still values books, for God’s sake, even though nobody he meets can stand the smell. Eunice seems to spend most of her time shopping for painful-sounding underwear and transparent jeans on the internet. You’re probably as surprised the two get along as they – well, she; as from the book’s opening pages he is to blinded by something that purports to be love – are.
Now I have created another rule. You can judge a book by its title, but you cannot judge a book by its first few chapters. The dystopian vision of the future author Gary Shteyngart starts out painting has been done to death whether in literature or in newspaper articles – a time where we all communicate via hand-held computerised gizmos rather than eye contact and visual cues. Shteyngart’s ‘apparats’ take contemporary scares over Facebook data mining and iPhone location tracking to new heights, continually broadcasting the holder’s credit rating or “fuckability” score like some monstrous game of technological Top Trumps. I am sure I am not alone in rolling my eyes at these perverse visions of the future which take their cues more from too many Daily Mail editorials than anything Orwellian. You may remember me saying so, in fact, but that was before I properly got into the book. Because this story doesn’t really get going until the power goes out and, as a still-recognisable New York crumbles in economic capitulation to the might of the Chinese, it’s the parallels with the world’s current situation that are truly terrifying – yet wickedly funny.
And throughout Lenny and Eunice – he with his diary, she through her email-Myspace amalgam messages and own language of acronyms – give us two sets of eyes with which to witness more events unfold than their relationship. Each view presents its own version of the ‘truth’ which, as is so often the way, does not make it simple to form an overwhelming or permanent allegiance to either character. The focus becomes more on the ‘story’ than any individual ‘love’, and is it a much better book for that.
Make of that what you will. They certainly did.
READ: An extract from Super Sad True Love Story [New York Times]
BUY: Amazon [UK]
Next up: Big Man by Clarence Clemons and Don Reo
