Little Failure A Memoir Author:Gary Shteyngart After three acclaimed novels?The Russian Debutante?s Handbook, Absurdistan, and Super Sad True Love Story?Gary Shteyngart now turns to memoir in a candid, witty, deeply poignant account of his life so far. Shteyngart shares his American immigrant experience, moving back and forth through time and memory with self-deprecating humor, moving insigh... more »ts, and literary bravado. The result is a resonant story of family and belonging that feels epic and intimate and distinctly his own.
Shteyngart?s loving but mismatched parents dreamed that he would become a lawyer or at least a ?conscientious toiler? on Wall Street, something their distracted son was simply not cut out to do. Fusing English and Russian, his mother created the term Failurchka?Little Failure?which she applied to her son. With love. Mostly.
As a result, Shteyngart operated on a theory that he would fail at everything he tried. At being a boyfriend, at being a writer, and most important, at being a worthwhile human being.
Born Igor Shteyngart in Leningrad during the twilight of the Soviet Union, the curious, diminutive, asthmatic boy grew up with a persistent sense of yearning?for food, for acceptance, for words?desires that would follow him into adulthood. At five, Igor decided to become a writer, and his grandmother paid him a slice of cheese for every page he produced. He wrote Lenin and His Magical Goose, his first novel.
In the late 1970s, world events changed Igor?s life, and his parents would change his name. Jimmy Carter and Leonid Brezhnev made a deal: exchange tankers of grain for the safe passage of Soviet Jews to America?a country Igor viewed as the enemy. Along the way, Igor became Gary so that he would suffer one or two fewer beatings from other kids. Coming to the United States after spending the first part of his childhood in the Soviet Union was equivalent to stumbling off a monochromatic cliff and landing in a pool of pure Technicolor.
Shteyngart recalls that the first two books he ever read were about small children shrunk to even smaller size and forced into a hostile place. Now those stories appeared to have come true, as he lived in two contradictory worlds, all the while wishing that he could find a real home in one. And somebody to love him. And somebody to lend him sixty-nine cents for a McDonald?s hamburger.
Provocative, hilarious, and inventive, Little Failure reveals a deeper vein of emotion in Gary Shteyngart?s prose. It is a memoir of an immigrant family coming to America, as told by a lifelong misfit who forged from his imagination an essential literary voice and, against all odds, a place in the world.
Praise for Gary Shteyngart
Super Sad True Love Story
?Wonderful . . . [combines] the tenderness of the Chekhovian tradition with the hormonal high jinks of a Judd Apatow movie.??Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
?An intoxicating brew of keen-edged satire, social prophecy, linguistic exuberance, and emotional wallop . . . The American novel is safe in Gary Shteyngart?s gifted hands.??David Mitchell
Absurdistan
?[Shteyngart] nails the tragicomedy of foreign relations. . . . Profoundly funny, genuinely moving and wholly lovable.??Time
?One of the funniest books in recent memory . . . Read Absurdistan for Shteyngart?s exuberant, wise, hilarious voice.??Los Angeles Times Book Review« less