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Gary Shteyngart

Gary Shteyngart Books

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Vera, or Faith

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Lake Success

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Absurdistan

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“Make-work," Daddy called her homework, derisively, and it mostly was a continuation of the school day, the careful reordering of numbers, letters, and concepts that would vaunt them into the appropriate high school, the appropriate college, and, for those whose families had recently arrived, into the "gleaming anus of capitalist society" (Daddy, of course, for which he was severely "censured" by Anne Mom).”

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Book:Vera, or Faith
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“We are a nation of shareholders," he had said more than once to Seema, trying to articulate his brand of no-nonsense but compassionate capitalism.... Several times during his Greyhound trip, Barry had paused to consider that, although he loved his fellow passengers deeply, he could not trust them at the voting booth because they were not shareholders. They did not understand the thrill and the pain and the obligation of owning a part of their country.”

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Book:Lake Success
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“Joshie has always told Post Human Services Staff to 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, so that each year, each month, each day, we transfer into a different person, an utterly unfaithful iteration of our original selves, of the drooling kid in the sandbox. But not me. I am still a facsimile of my early childhood. I am still looking for a loving dad to lift me up and brush the sand off my ass and to hear English, calm and hurtless, fall off his lips.”

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Author:Gary Shteyngart
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“Vera's monkey brain was "racing." She wanted someone to talk to her and to get some of her words out, but Daddy and the Seal had now switched to Russian and their conversation was growing more somber, because that's what Russian did to you. Her teacher, the other Vera, had never once smiled, even when reading the ostensibly funny book about a clumsy bear who failed to live by the complex rules of forest society and constantly needed to learn distsiplina (discipline) from his animal peers. "We can all use some more distsiplina," Teacher Vera would say. "It is what our vozhd"--or "leader"--"expects from us." Then she would show them the photograph of a man who looked like a sad but disciplined hamster in a suit in front of a tricolor flag.”

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Book:Vera, or Faith
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“These are all good things, I said. But no one knows where your country is or who you are. You don't have a familiar ethnic cuisine; your diaspora , from what I understand, is mostly in Southern California, three time zones removed from the national media in New York; and you don't have a recognizable, long-simmering conflict like the one between the Israelis and the Palestinians, where people in the richer nations can take sides and argue over at the dinner table. The best you can do is get the United Nations involved, as in East Timor. Maybe they'll send troops." "We don't want the United Nations" Mr. Nanabragov said. "We don't want Sri Lankan troops patrolling our streets. We're better tan that. We want America.”

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Book:Absurdistan
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“So I'm only ten, she thought to herself. And then she imagined her future self, a middle-school Vera, a high-school Vera, a college Vera, a girlfriend Vera, a woman-in-STEM Vera, a mommy Vera, all looking back at this ten-year-old present-day, present-second Vera with all the pity and wonder and faith that older people needed to just get through the rest of their lives.”

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Book:Vera, or Faith
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“But now he wondered if the Asian girl at the end of the commercials was not there to sell the Hostess spurting pastry or whatnot, but rather to sell America. Like the Statue of Liberty showing off her armpit at the end of the Sure commercial, the girl spoke more to a Cold War ideal of America--look who we let in! Hardworking Asians! Whereas a Vinod-type presence in one of his white V-neck sweaters (all three brothers wore them on special occasions, cute as lambs) might have confused the audience. Why isn't that Brown guy selling us a taco shell that won't break?”

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Book:Our Country Friends
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“The news affected Senderovsky more than it did the others. He watched the video footage of the Midwestern murder-by-cop over and over while he was on the toilet locked in the upstairs bathroom. He memorized the scene. The ugly institutional shoes, the ugly institutional pants, the baton and flashlight and walkie-talkie, the upturned sunglasses worn high over the buzz cut, and beneath all that brute institutional force, a dying man crying out the last word that was likely also his first, those two repeating syllables, Ma and Ma. And then he was a man no more, but a lifeless slab hoisted on an institutional gurney, and there was static and instructions and dispatch codes. All of it perfectly commonplace, like an order for Gruyere cheese placed at the local market for curbside pickup.”

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Book:Our Country Friends
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“As an immigrant his mission had been simple. He was brought here by his parents to make money off what an important Jewish author had once termed "the American berserk." You came, they laughed at your accent on an urban playground, and then you were given your degrees and guided into battle. By which point, you were just a scab sent in to reinforce the established order. In the video, as the white policeman was draining the air from his Black victim's lungs with his knee, another cop, a Hmong immigrant, stood in front of him in a wide-open stance, daring anyone to come to the dying man's aid. He could have been a Russian, a Korean, a Gujarati. All of us, Senderovsky thought, are in service to an order that has long predated us. All of us have come to feast on this land of bondage. And all of us are useful and expendable in turn.”

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Book:Our Country Friends
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“The truth is this: The rich will rule even at a place like Oberlin, where their kind is technically forbidden. They will simply invert the power structure to suit their needs. They will come out on top no matter what. Stuyvesant was hard but hopeful; Oberlin, on the other hand, reminds me yet again how the world works. I guess that's why they call it an education.”

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Book:Little Failure: A Memoir
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“There's no present left. This is the problem for a novelist. [The problem] is the present is gone. We're all living in the future constantly . . . Back in the day Leo Tolstoy -- what a sweetheart of a count and of a writer -- in the 1860's he wanted to write about the Napoleonic Campaign, about 1812. If you write about 1812 in 1860, a horse is still a horse. A carriage is still a carriage. Obviously, there are been some technological advancements, et cetera, but you don't have to worry about explaining the next killer [iPhone] app or the next Facebook because right now things are happening so quickly. ("Gary Shteyngart: Finding 'Love' In A Dismal Future", NPR interview, August 2, 2010)”

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Author:Gary Shteyngart
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“My poor Eunice looked so tired when she huffed off the bus with her many bags that I nearly tackled her in a rejuvenating embrace, but I was careful not to make a scene, waving my roses and champagne at the armed men to prove that I had enough Credit to afford Retail, and then kissed her passionately on one cheek (she smelled of flight and moisturizer), then on the straight, thin, oddly non-Asian nose, then the other cheek, then back to the nose, then once more the first cheek, following the curve of freckles backward and forward, marking her nose like a bridge to be crossed twice. The champagne bottle fell out of my hands, but, whatever futuristic garbage it was made of, it didn't break.”

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Book:Super Sad True Love Story
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