Thursday, March 17, 2011

BOOK # 51 SUPER SAD TRUE LOVE STORY By: Gary Steyngart


Due to my love of dystopian literature a handful of smarties recommended I read this funny and terrifying book. Yes it is a love story of sorts and while the romance between smart, soulful, late thirties Lenny and image-obsessed, well-intentioned, barely legal Eunice is definitely interesting (albeit infuriating) where this story soars is in it's depiction of an America with even less substance than we have now, completely ungovernable, and on the brink of total fiscal collapse.

It’s “zero hour for our economy,” says one of Lenny’s friends, “zero hour for our military might, zero hour for everything that used to make us proud to be ourselves.”

The story is written through Lenny's diaries and Eunice's "Global Teens Account" (imagine if facebook completely took over the way we communicate with each other- in it's entirety) and it's an incredibly effective use of POV. Slow start- but hits the ground running soon enough.

The thing that made Super Sad True Love Story so effective was how completely in the realm of possibility it all was: people's worth being ruled by their credit scores-people being so obsessed with their apparats (imagine the iphone 25.0) that they lose all human connection- the US deficit so grave that we're basically put on the chopping block.

This is a book not only for anyone who enjoys dystopian fiction but also for anyone with an interest in the fate of America.



A-


*NY Times Notable Book
*NY Times Best Books of 2010
*Barnes and Noble Top 25 Books of 2010


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