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In a recent NYRB (7/13/06)review of Gary Shteyngart's most
recent novel,
Christian Caryl wrote the
following:
<snip>
In fact, Misha's supreme self-absorption
is one of the novel's most reliable
comedic devices. Here's how he describes
the beginning of his affair with
Nana, the daughter of a malevolent would-be
Absurdi dictator (and a senior
at New York University): "The next week I
spent in love-with her, with the
distant American city we held in common, and
with myself for being able to
so quickly recover from the post-traumatic
stress of Sakha's murder and
Aloysha-Bob's flight." His tryst with this
newfound love interest is so
gratifying that Misha just can't help himself,
confessing to her father:
"Your Nana has made me so happy here. I almost wish
this war would never
end." His most earnest convictions seem to depend
largely on the company
he's keeping at a given moment, as when he's hanging
out with the Sevo
nationalists: "God help me, but I found their feudal
mentality charming." Or
take this wonderful excursus:
On that night I was left with only the truth that nothing of
our
personality survives after death, that in the end all that was
Misha
Vainberg would evaporate along with the styles and delusions of his
epoch,
leaving behind not one flutter of his sad heavy brilliance, not one
damp
spot around which his successors could congregate to appreciate his life
and
times.
I started to shake in both anger and
fear, wrapping my arms around me in
a sorrowful embrace, for I so loved my
personality that I would kill
everyone in my path to ensure its
survival.
It's at moments like these that Shteyngart's indebtedness to
Vladimir
Nabokov makes itself felt most clearly, and for good reason. I don't
think
it will be inflicting any reductive indignities upon Misha Vainberg to
say
that he looks a bit like an early-twenty-first-century descendant of
Humbert
Humbert, yet another antihero whose epic capacity for self-delusion
and
prattle about his own sophistication make him so monstrous-and such
a
pleasure to read. To be sure, Vainberg is raunchy where Humbert
contented
himself with steamy circumlocution; I can't imagine Nabokov
depicting one of
his heroes, as Shteyngart does, with a girlfriend's
exploring finger in the
"mossy bull's-eye of my ass." Yet they do have some
things in common. Both
characters are parodic emissaries between the Old
World and the New who end
up exposing the convictions of both; both end up
dabbling in criminality as
they pursue their respective passions; both are in
love with American
females whose vul-gar simplicity helps to make them
desirable. And both use
their manic odysseys as occasions to show off the
riotous, extravagant
possibilities of the English language that they've
appropriated.
And style, in the end, is what Shteyngart is really after.
Misha, like
Humbert, comes to life through his own rapacious command of
words. The
modern day's holy grail of authenticity matters nothing to these
greedy
shape-shifters. All too often we take language as the great
identifier, the
ultimate bar code. You are what you speak. But what if you
can do the talk
like Misha? Then you've transcended mere identity politics
and turned
identity into opportunity, something huge, ravishing, and
multifarious. Our
blood, or our governments, would have us be one thing.
Language lets us be
many.
Especially, as in Misha's case, when it's
illuminated by love. Here's Misha,
still trapped in Absurdistan, after a
crucial e-mail from Rouenna has
summoned his imagination away from his
physical address:
But I wasn't
there.
I was on that stretch of East Tremont Avenue in
the Bronx, our stretch,
which starts from El Batey Restaurant near Marmion
Avenue and then swelters
down to the Blimpie franchise on Hughes, where, back
in '98, Rouenna's
favorite cousin was busted by the cops for some
complicated,
non-sandwich-related offense.
East
Tremont Avenue, solider purveyor of unattainable dreams, where
stores will
sell you toda para99c y menos, 79c gets you a whole chicken at
Fine Fare, and
$79 will land you a flowery upright mattress with a
"five-year warrenty";
where a 325-pound Russian man with a hot mamita on his
arm is respected and
accepted by all; where dudes wheeling by on bicycles
and young mothers
languidly window-shopping at She-She Juniors & Ladies will
subject me to
the same breathless local query: "Yo, Misha, ?que ongo, a-ai?"
In the
end, after all his travails, Belgian passport held close to his
heart, Misha
sets out to reclaim the girl of his dreams-in stark contrast to
Humbert, by
the way, who writes his story in prison. (On the very last page
of the novel,
as he's preparing to head back to the States, Misha refers to
his Rouenna as
"Ro"-a nice flick in the direction of Humbert's "Lo" that
underlines this
fundamental difference.) Still, can a beast like Misha ever
really have a
home? The book ends before we can know for sure. Strangely
enough, for all of
his gross indiscretions, we find ourselves wishing him
well. The New World is
about nothing if not second chances. The Bronx as a
study in salvation: if
Shteyngart's hero can pull it off, perhaps there's
something to be said for
America after all.
<end of review>
David
Powelstock
Asst. Prof. of Russian & East European Literatures
Chair,
Program in Russian & East European Studies
Brandeis University
GREA,
MS 024
Waltham, MA 02454-9110
781.736.3347 (Office)
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