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A review by sde
Little Failure by Gary Shteyngart
3.0
This book was hard to rate. I found parts of it laugh-out-loud funny, and I'm sure I annoyed my family as I read passage after passage out loud to them while I we were on a trip to the beach. But sometimes the author was kind of annoying - I get why his mentor broke up with him. I enjoyed the narrative of his years through college much more than the post-college stuff where I just felt like telling him to pull himself together and look outward once in a while. I did feel for him and his horrible time fitting in at Solomon Schechter School of Queens. It was great when he finally found his people at Stuyvesant, but, well, otherwise his narrative isn't much of an advertisement for that school!
I think I would like his fiction more than the memoir since I know that it is, um, fiction, even the books that are based on his life. It gives the reader a little more distance to enjoy the story, and I don't have to feel so bad for his parents being exposed like they are in their memoir. Yeah, they were not perhaps the best parents, and some of the ways the author depicts them is funny, but at times they come off as more awful even though they were just trying to make a new life in a new place after being almost totally cut off from their homeland. I do love how by the end they have all come to terms with each other, quirks and all.
I think I would like his fiction more than the memoir since I know that it is, um, fiction, even the books that are based on his life. It gives the reader a little more distance to enjoy the story, and I don't have to feel so bad for his parents being exposed like they are in their memoir. Yeah, they were not perhaps the best parents, and some of the ways the author depicts them is funny, but at times they come off as more awful even though they were just trying to make a new life in a new place after being almost totally cut off from their homeland. I do love how by the end they have all come to terms with each other, quirks and all.