Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story

Let's just get it out there right now: nobody does it like Gary Shteyngart. I finally got my copy of his new book yesterday, and I used all the free time I had today reading it. He is a juggernaut. His prose explodes. You can't explain to someone else how funny he is because his funnyness doesn't happen; it's just embedded in his choices from details to language. Then there's the fearlessness thing - the rules of propriety don't matter, but his purpose is so strong, his vision so clear, that it's okay for him to get mired in scatological and sexual language. I wonder if guys like him put strong sexual language in their novels just so nobody will teach them in schools.

Anyway, I'm 78 pages into the book, and I'm trying to figure out how to keep it from going by so quickly. I'm sure there will be passages I'll like, and maybe even copy down the way I've copied some Aleksandr Hemon passages in the past, but this one is all about the energy, and so far it has the same forward thinking and literary traditionalism as Absurdistan, but don't expect analysis, unless you find me looking at the different narrative voices as a way of figuring out how to do such things myself.

I guess I can write short posts if I type them directly into the blogger dashboard instead of writing poolside in Word. Ciao.