The Russian Debutante's Handbook | Gary Shteyngart | Shteyngart is a word smith indeed

The Russian Debutante's Handbook | Gary Shteyngart | Hilarious!

books:

The Russian Debuta...

	The Russian Debutante's Handbook Gary Shteyngart Riverhead Hardcover, 2002 - 452 pages average customer review:based on 86 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

highly recommended

Shteyngart is a word smith indeed

Although Shteyngart's novel weaves an incredibly entertaining story, bordering on the insane, it is his writing that deserves 5 stars. Both his vocabulary and his sentences are rich and expressive--as a reader I find myself re-reading passages just to let his style sink in.

This book is a must read for anyone who enjoys creative writing on all levels, not just on plot and character alone.

Hilarious!

Gary Shteyngart's first novel, The Russian Debutante's Handbook, is a provocative yet hysterical story about a young Russian American nobody who gets caught up in the mob scene of "Prava", a Russian sort of Paris-wanna-be where the Russian gangsters and pseudo-intellectual students from Ohio rub elbows (if you can imagine such a place). His characters and their subsequent situations were right out of a Henry Miller novel, yet there is a youthful tenderness that emerges, ala Brighton Beach Memoirs. Reading it was a nice change of pace. I will keep my eyes open for the next one. A promising young writer.

for more information click here

Many in-jokes, picaresque Mafia Portnoy's Complaint...

I read this for the section dealing with expatriates in Prague-- here called "Prava." If you spent any time there in the nineties, you'll see a lot of in-jokes and satire that may cause you to chuckle-- the Prague Post here named Prava-dence, Cafe Radost called Joy, and so on.

But in truth that section is not what the book is "about" (nor is there a lot of detail about it)-- it's a comic/dark fantasy coming-of-age that takes on America, Russia, Central Europe-- none of it terribly deeply. It's sort of a Russian Philip Roth-- Girshkin's ruminations on women and sex take up a lot of the book and they are remarkably unerotic; sex seems to be all animal smells and bodily fulids.

The story of an American/Russian boy (Like the author, the protagonist moved to America as a child) who for complicated reasons ends up in Central Europe as an entrepreneurial mafioso is episodic, wordy, intermittently funny but ultimately oddly uninvolving.

This got ecstatic reviews and awards when it came out, and there's no doubt that Shteyngart writes well, but the comparisons to Waugh are misplaced. Waugh was concise-- Shteyngart goes on, and on, and on. This book would be a lot more fun if it were a solid 150 pages shorter.

As it is, had I not been interested in the Prague satire, I think i'd have stopped reading-- this kind of blood-and-semen boy-into-man comedy is not something I usually enjoy.

Like Philip Roth, whose Portnoy's Complaint is so well written but kind of gross, I will keep an eye on Shteyngart and read him again. If you like that kind of story, you'll like this too.

for more information click here