Review: Absurdistan

Absurdistan, by Gary Steyngart.
[rating:5/5]

“May we help you with something?” the flattop repeated. His face had a single long crack running from forehead to chin, as if he had been dropped one time too many as a child. “This place isn’t for you, fellow. The consulate is closed. Shove off.”

“I want to see the charge d’affaires,” I said. “I am Misha Vainberg, son of the famous Boris Vainberg who peed on the dog in front of the KGB headquarters during the Soviet times.” I leaned against the wall of the consulate building and spread my arms out, exposing the white of my stomach the way a puppy shows he’s defenseless in front of a larger dog. “My father was a very big dissident. Bigger than Sharansky! Once the Americans hear of what he’s done for freedome of religion, they’ll build a statue to him in Times Square.”

The two security guards smiled broadly at each other. It isn’t often anymore that you can beat up a Jew in an official capacity in Russia, so when the chance comes, you have to grab it. You have to beat the Jew for church and fatherland or you’ll regret it for the rest of your life. The guy with the Caesar cut flexed the rolls of his neck in provocation. “If you don’t leave immediately,” he said, “you’re going to have some problems with us.”

Steyngart’s novel follows events that Misha Vainberg, son of a the 1,238-richest man in Russia. He’s heavy and Hasidic Jews botched his adult circumcision. He ends up in the former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan, oops, I mean Absurdistan, as it enters a state of ethic civil war.

The crowd passed me around, squeezing and poking. This is what Jesus must have felt like on a good day. I was relayed under the tentacle-arches of the Sevo Vatican and toward the sad greenery of the waterfront. There was rumbling above us. A deep groaning sound. Then a couple of pop-pop-pops. Small arms fire. I looked up, hoping to catch sight of my favorite GRAD missiles. Nothing doing. The teenage members of one of the True Footrest Posses were scrambling up a hill with their mortars and surface-to-air missiles. Good luck, kids! I hit something hard and stony. An old woman was laid out on an enormous marble conch shell, part of some defunct art nouveau fountain. Her whole family was crying over her, children by her feet, grown-ups at the head. “Is she dead?” I asked them.

“We’ll never forget her,” the relatives wailed.

“Don’t be so sure,” I said, trying to be sympathetic. “What may seem like a terrible loss today may be just an uncomfortable memory tomorrow. She was old. Hard to carry. use this opportunity to move to America.” But after I spoke, the sobbing only increased. A fist waved through the air attached to some glandular epithets. I moved away, shaking my head. the people had lost their senses. It was all just jungle emotions now. They couldn’t wait to start mourning one another. That was the one thing they knew backward and forward. Death from above, death from within. Tyrants and heart attacks. The three most popular words in the Russian language: “Stalin. Gitler. Infarkt.”

The book has great scenes with American contractors from KBR and Halliburton who are partying away in posh hotels as Absurdistan destroys itself. An intelligence officer talks about the American electorate:
“Then we really let the cat out of the bag. We tell them, ‘Look, there’s a genocide happening, and the U.S. can invade one of the following ten countries.’ We give them a list of countries, real and imaginary. We’ve got Djibouti, Yolanda, Costa Rica, Eastern Tuchusland, Absurdsvani, and so forth. Guess what came in dead last, even behind the reviled Homoslavia? That’s right. See, the way ‘Absurdsvani’ is pronounced and spelled, it’s utterly impossible for an American to feel anything for it. You have to be able to use a country as a child’s first name to get anywhere. RWANDA Jones. SOMALIA Cohen. TIMOR Jackson. BOSNIA Lewis-Wright. And then you this REPUBLIKA ABSURDSVANI. Hopeless.”

Absurdistan, by Gary Steyngart.
[rating:5/5]