What can love do?

Super Sad True Love Story - Gary Shteyngart (Random House, 2010)

Once upon a time, I really enjoyed The Russian Debutante's Handbook and Gary Shteyngart in general. But you know how you get lazy about following the stuff you like?

So over the summer I read excerpts from SSTLS in the New Yorker. And that's how it ended up on my book list. Although it then took, what? 6 months to actually get my hands on it. But here it is.

In short: dystopian future. Shteyngart as always does a great job of creating a world that is recognizable and yet totally different. The US is collapsing, and is pure consumerism and cell phones and rankings and .... man, I hate doing these overviews in any sort of way that makes sense. So screw it. Let me skip to the interesting parts.

Lenny's diaries are interspersed with the e-mails and chat transcripts (although they have different names) of Eunice, the girl he falls madly in love with and who, for her own reasons, finds her way to him. What makes them so fascinating and heart-breaking is how much they cannot communicate at all, how little we can actually express to the people we love, the ones we want to understand us most. And how little sense life makes, even at the best of times, and certainly not in a country falling apart.

Some moments:

• "keep a diary, to remember who we were, because every moment our brains and synapses are being rebuilt and rewired with maddening disregard for our personalities ..."
• a passage I cannot find about Lenny's attempt to spend an entire week without books .... this in a world where no one reads, and no one has read for decades. And yet, despite this, the Naughty Librarian look continues to be desirable.
• "the clarity of being alive during conclusive times, the joy of being historically important by association." [I remember feeling this - although far more dread - on 9/11, the wish that I could have lived when history wasn't happening.]
• on bipartisanship's dangers: "When we lost touch with how much we really hate each other, we also lost the responsibility for our common future."
• "I felt the weakness of these books, their immateriality, how they had failed to change the world." And I felt so much weight on much shoulders when I read that. And then, this lovely lovely line:
• "The fading light is us, and we are , for a moment so brief it can't even register on our äppärät screens, beautiful."

Lenny and Eunice. They're each terribly flawed, but their flaws make them truly real and human. It's especially noticeable in Eunice, who starts out such a cipher, such a creature of this brave, unhappy new world. Lenny sees depths in her, and we don't. Turns out he was right, just not in the way he expected.

New Yorker Fiction!

So The New Yorker had a summer fiction issue again! And like one of the very first I remember reading, this one features Jonathan Safran Foer. This time, he's one of "20 Under 40" - a pretty eclectic group of young authors, most of whom will be familiar to NYer readers.

This issue had stories by eight of the 20, with the rest to come in the next several issues. I tend to stick with this magazine for the reporting, not the fiction, but it's nice to have a nice big set of stories from time to time.

You can see more about the authors, including individual Q&A and links to their stories (if already published), here. Frustratingly, a bunch of the stories aren't available online except to subscribers, but some are. In brief, I am curious to see if Foer's "Here We Aren't, So Quickly" is part of a larger project, and I heartily enjoyed (as usual) Gary Shteyngart in "Lenny Hearts Eunice." Everything else was good (in that New Yorker fiction way) but I will just leave it at that.

Festival of Books, Day 1

It was that time of year again, where I drop everything and spend the weekend traipsing around UCLA. I was choosier this year about panels, but still spent 8 hours at the Festival on Saturday.

My morning began with a trip around the grounds before heading to "Food Fight: When Did Eating Get Controversial?" moderated by Times columnist Russ Parsons. Joining him were three professors: sociologist Barry Glassner (USC), nutrition scientist Marion Nestle (NYU), and journalist Michael Pollan (Cal). Discussion ranged from GMOs to industrial farming to the rise of farmers markets to the cultural identities involved in eating. And probably more. Calories and corn made several appearances as well. I was utterly taken with Nestle, who was joyful and enthusiastic. I imagine she is amazing in the classroom (not to imply that the others aren't). Several books going on my list after this.

Next up, a trip across campus to the oddly named "Fiction: Jumping Off the Page," I guess referring to the vivid nature of these writer's prose. And the writers? A uniformly witty crew: Chris Bohjalian, Peter Orner, Gary Shteyngart (the only of the writers I knew before), and Marianne Wiggins, whose name was familiar but unplaced. The authors discussed their upcoming/most recent books, their writing habits and styles, how they are best friends with their editors, and... oh, and lots of comments about various quirks and neuroses. I want to read all of their books now. And I kind of have a crush on Orner.

Next came more wandering and time for reading the paper. And finally, a reading by T.C. Boyle. He read the story "Beat," a pulsing account of a adolescent boy's rendezvous with Jack Kerouac and his cohorts. He said, and I forget how often this is true, that there is something so valuable about hearing a work in the author's own voice. I would add that hearing it at all is a different and important way to experience fiction. Cadence and timing become important, and it's utterly unlike reading, where I see at least 5 or 6 words (if not more) at once. So that was cool, and of course he is himself an epitome of sorts of cool. And therefore a good way to end the day.

Day 1 Purchases:
"Save a Child, Save the World" t-shirt from Skirball, supporting International Relief Committee work in Darfur.

Day 1 Swag:
Ghiradelli chocolate squares
free copies of The Nation
soundtrack to Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, coming soon to HBO (plus bookmarks!)
BookTV totebag
Walt Disney Concert Hall magnet
Organic basil seeds from Toyota
Shake and light flashlight (also from Toyota)