Absurdistan (2006)

Poor Misha Vainberg. The protagonist of Gary Shteyngart's acclaimed satirical novel, Absurdistan, desperately wants to leave his homeland, Russia, to return to the United States. There, Misha went to college on his oligarch father's ruble and, upon graduation and a move to Manhattan, met his beloved Bronx-born and -bred girlfriend, Rouenna, who awaits his return to the U.S.

But Misha begins the story stuck in his native St. Petersburg (or St. Leninsburg, as he prefers to call it) because the U.S. State Department won't give him a visa. Why? Because his father, Boris--in the stereotypical Russian oligarch (read mobster) fashion--had an Oklahoma businessman offed when a business deal went south.

After Boris is killed in retaliation for the murder of the American, Misha ends up traveling to the former Soviet republic of Absurdsvanï, where he tries to swing a deal with a corrupt Belgian diplomat to obtain a forged Belgian passport in his first step to get back to America. Yet instead of finding himself one step closer to the USA, Misha finds himself further mired when he gets caught in the middle of a civil war between two Christian ethnic groups.

This is the setting for the bulk of Shteyngart's farcical tale, and it works well for most of the story. Shteyngart sharply and vividly portrays Absurdsvanï as a backwater country on the Caspian Sea, rich in oil and possessing a capital city newly invaded by Halliburton and other American oil companies. The two warring ethnic groups--the Svani and the Sevo--hate each other simply because each group prefers a different version of the Orthodox Christian crucifix, which difference in preference led to a bit of ethnic cleansing centuries ago. As the story progresses, we come to find out that there is much more to this ethnic conflict than appears on the surface (which I won't spoil here), and it doesn't have to do with crucifix preferences.

A core strength of the book is the character of Misha. He's grossly overweight (referred to as "Snack Daddy" by his college friends) and has a penchant for vintage track suits, gold chains, and hip-hop. He was the victim of a botched circumcision by Chabadniks, so he has a few issues with his khui (as he calls it). He is hopelessly but charmingly naive when it comes to women. Due to his father's fortune, he has enough money to last him for eternity. But it is this fact, which has allowed him to cruise through his adult life with no true purpose, that causes him to pursue a true sense of manhood.

Shteyngart deftly uses Misha's story to pillory Russian culture and immoral global capitalism. In the book, Absurdi locals refer to Halliburton as "Golly Burton," and the Absurdi government officials do everything they possibly can to suck up to the minions of the energy conglomerate.

The book, however, is not without its problems. Shteyngart's mode of satire is often hilarious, but it also tends to be cloying. His humor borders on the overly clever, and some might find his prose to convey conceit instead of incisive social criticism. This produces some rocky patches in the book that I had to struggle to get past. But these deficiencies do not outweigh the story as a whole, which is unquestionably entertaining. In closing, I wouldn't necessarily recommend this as a purchase unless you're a serious book collector; however, I do recommend it as a library loaner for an entertaining summer read.

A post-apocalyptic tale: The Road (2006)

Every once in awhile, I'll check in to see what Oprah's Book Club is touting as the "must read" of the moment. Most of the time, I'm not drawn to Oprah's selections. But the current OBC book, Cormac McCarthy's The Road, is easily one of the best books that Oprah has ever picked.

The Road, which was nominated for a 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award, narrates the struggle for survival by a father and son in a post-apocalyptic United States. The American countryside has been incinerated in an unnamed disaster. The air is filled with ash; all flora are charred and lifeless. Groups of scavengers roam the highways looking for food. Bands of cannibals hide out in abandoned buildings, waiting for unsuspecting prey to wander by. The father and son, who remain nameless in the book, are making their way to the sea. The father hopes to find some sort of salvation at the shore; what that salvation is, he doesn't know.

At first blush, The Road may appear to be much like other post-apocalyptic stories, which are too many to count and tend to rely too often on stale plot devices. But McCarthy, whom many consider to be one of the most gifted if not the best living American writer, imbues the tale with something different and remarkable. The dead world depicted in the story is merely a setting, a backdrop, for what is a moving tale of the love between a father and a son. They revere each other, not so much because each depends upon the other for the basic necessities of life, but because they formed their unbreakable bond before the world ended.

The Road also emphasizes the moral ambiguities that we all encounter in life. Most of us consider ourselves to be "good," but what does that word really mean? The father tells the son that they are the "good guys." But on one occasion, the father decides not to help another person in need, all because of his desire to preserve the lives of his son and, of course, himself.

This is a book that will have you pondering it long after you've finished it. If you're like me, you'll have a hard time resisting the urge to immediately read it again. McCarthy's idiosyncratic writing style, which is refreshingly simple yet full of prosaic devices designed to keep the reader rapt with attention, powerfully pushes the story along. Even though I don't have children, I was greatly moved by this story. After putting down this book, those of you who do have kids will probably feel compelled to pull them close to you, hold them tightly, and be thankful for the gift of parenthood.

Maus: A Survivor's Tale (1973-1991)

When I was a kid, I was somewhat of a comic book reader. I can't say that I was a comic book collector because I never went searching for rare, priceless issues of Spiderman or The X-Men or put my comic books in plastic laminate. Rather, I just wanted to read good stories coupled with pictures.

And good stories I did read. It's amazing that compelling, complex plot lines appear in the comic book medium, but both Marvel and DC have tackled some pretty weighty issues. For example, my favorite comic series was The X-Men, in which the heroes were not only busy saving the world, but were also dealing with and battling racial prejudice.

While I read plenty of comic books, I never got around to reading a graphic novel. This is probably because the graphic novel phenomenon didn't take hold until the mid- to late 1980's, when I began to cop an attitude about comic books and had decided that they weren't worth my time any longer.

In retrospect, that was an unfortunate and misguided decision because I just finished one of the best books I've read in the last several years, and that book happens to be a graphic novel: Art Spiegelman's Maus: A Survivor's Tale.

Spiegelman was a pioneer in the alternative comic genre and began writing Maus as a comic strip serial that appeared in the alternative comic magazine RAW, which he co-edited with his wife. In Maus, Spiegelman tells the story of his father, Vladek, who was a Polish Jew and a Holocaust survivor. Those involved in Vladek's story are depicted by Spiegelman as anthropomorphic animals. Jews are mice; Germans are cats; Poles are pigs (a depiction which drew some ire); the French are frogs; the British are fish; and Americans are dogs. At first blush, these depictions might seem to trivialize the events of the Holocaust. But they actually serve a metaphorical purpose, particularly in the case of the Jews being depicted as mice and the Germans as cats. Indeed, at the beginning of the second half of the novel, Spiegelman quotes from a German newspaper article from the mid-1930's that drives home the metaphor:

Mickey Mouse is the most miserable ideal ever revealed. . . . Healthy emotions tell every independent young man and every honorable youth that the dirty and filth-covered vermin, the greatest bacteria carrier in the animal kingdom, cannot be the ideal type of animal . . . . Away with Jewish brutalization of the people! Down with Mickey Mouse! Wear the Swastika Cross!

Vladek's story is like the story of so many other Holocaust survivors. We see the Nazi's seizure of the businesses and homes of Vladek and his family. We see the terror that gripped Europe's Jewish communities as they were herded into ghettos. We see the eventual deportation of the Jews to the death camps in Eastern Europe. And, we see the combination of resourcefulness and luck that Vladek used to survive the Holocaust.

But Spiegelman makes his father's tale unique and engaging in several ways. First, there is the obvious difference from other Holocaust stories: the medium through which it is told. By telling Vladek's tale in words and pictures, Spiegelman permits the reader to take in a story that is more palpable than it would have been had it been told merely in prose. Second, Spiegelman tells us not only about Vladek's harrowing experiences in Nazi-ruled Europe; he also tells us about his strained but loving relationship with Vladek. Finally, and probably most effectively, Spiegelman does not portray Vladek as a saintly figure. Instead, we get to see Vladek's good traits--his resourcefulness and intelligence--as well as his flaws--his mistreatment of his second wife, his overly miserly nature, and his prejudice against African-Americans. By showing us his father's drawbacks, Spiegelman humanizes Vladek in a way that allows the reader to closely identify with Vladek.

Spiegelman won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for the book, and deservedly so. Maus is a powerful book that will have you thinking about it long after you have finished it.

The Stranger (Matthew Ward translation, 1988)

Standing on a beach
With a gun in my hand
Staring at the sea
Staring at the sand
Staring down the barrel
At the Arab on the ground
See his open mouth
But hear no sound

I'm alive
I'm dead
I'm the stranger
Killing an Arab

~ The Cure, "Killing an Arab"

I remember listening to this song for the first time back in 1986. I was a sophomore in college, and I had just picked up The Cure's first compilation album, Standing on a Beach, and was spinning the record for the first time. The album was essentially a greatest hits compilation, and it was my first Cure record.

Up until that point, I had never heard the album's opening track, "Killing an Arab," which was originally released in the U.S. on the band's 1980 album, Boys Don't Cry. As I sat on my bunk and listened to the song, I wondered why the song's protagonist was motivated to murder his victim. Was the motive a typical one, such as racism, jealously, greed, or psychosis?

Actually, it was none of these. If I had been aware of the song's inspiration--the pivotal moment in Albert Camus' classic novel, The Stranger--then I would have known that the killer wasn't motivated by what one would think was a "normal" motive to kill. Rather, the killer pulled the trigger simply because of the glare of the sun.

As I mentioned in my first entry in this blog, I missed a lot of classic literature in my high school and college years, so my ignorance of the connection between the Cure song and The Stranger was not surprising. I chose to read The Stranger after learning that President Bush read the novel last summer. I figured that if he--a guy who has admitted that he doesn't read newspapers--has time to sit down and read what is regarded as an important 20th Century novel, then I certainly could make time to do it. I read the book with no knowledge of absurdism or existentialism, which are the two movements of philosophy with which The Stranger is typically connected. So I suppose that I bring somewhat of an outsider's perspective to the book.

The plot of the book is actually not all that complex. Meursault, a Frenchman living in Algeria, learns that his mother, who was living in a home for the elderly, has passed away. He attends her funeral, displaying no emotion and a bit of ennui about her death. This, not surprisingly, is unsettling to those around him.

After Meursault returns home, he begins hanging around with an unsavory neighbor named Raymond, who seems to enjoy beating up women. One of these women is an Arab woman with whom Raymond apparently had an affair. Raymond enlists Meursault's help in luring the woman to Raymond's apartment--Meursault writes her a letter to get her to come--where Raymond smacks her around until the police intervene.

After Raymond is released by the police, Meursault and his girlfriend, Marie, take an excursion to a beach house with Raymond. As Meursault, Raymond, and their host, Masson, are walking down the beach, they encounter the Arab woman's brother. Raymond and the brother have tangled with each other in the past, and they get into another fight. The Arab knifes Raymond, so Meursault and Masson take him back to Masson's beach house. Meursault takes the pistol that Raymond was carrying and returns to shoot the Arab with Raymond's gun. The first bullet kills the man, but Meursault fires four more times. As mentioned, Meursault's only explanation for the shooting is the glare of the sun. The rest of novel describes Meursault's trial, conviction, and wait to be executed at the guillotine.

Meursault is a rather unsympathetic protagonist because he cares little for the feelings of others. For example, he won't tell Marie that he loves her, yet half-heartedly agrees that they should marry. And he doesn't blanch when Raymond asks him to write the letter that lures the Arab woman to Raymond's apartment. In addition, Meursault is unlikeable because his attitude toward life is listless. When his boss offers him the chance to transfer from Algiers to Paris, Meursault refuses. When Meursault's boss says that he should embrace a change in life, Meursault replies that "people never change their lives."

Despite these character flaws, Meursault is an intriguing character because he seems to unquestioningly accept his fate after the murder. He immediately admits to the killing. Despite the attempts of his lawyer to explain away his actions at trial, Meursault tells the judges and the jury the truth about his motive for the killing, no matter how strange or ridiculous it might sound. And even as he sits in prison awaiting his execution, he refuses a priest's attempt to get him to accept Jesus Christ as his savior, clinging to the notion that there is no god.

Undoubtedly, others have gleaned different meanings from this story. For me, The Stranger was a lesson in how not to live life. Perhaps that interpretation is facile. But I know that I could never live life in such a callous manner with such a bleak outlook. To care for others, to want to act to benefit humanity, is part of human nature. To disregard that benevolent capacity is terribly wasteful and truly leaves one open to a life of emptiness. I realize that this notion is in direct conflict with the concept of absurdism, but perhaps absurdism is itself absurd because of the human instinct to seek out meaning in life. That instinct is inevitable, and, I would argue, healthy.