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Chargement... Little Failure: A Memoir (édition 2014)par Gary Shteyngart
Information sur l'oeuvreMémoires d'un bon à rien par Gary Shteyngart
Books Read in 2014 (636) Chargement...
Inscrivez-vous à LibraryThing pour découvrir si vous aimerez ce livre Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre. Een Russisch-joodse jongen die in New York opgroeit, wordt door iedereen – zijn ouders inbegrepen – als een kleine mislukkeling beschouwd. Hij is echter een overlever, heeft een vaste band met zijn grootmoeder en … Vond ik niet fameus. ( ) Even though he claims to be reining in his shtick here, he seems like a yukster who isn't as funny as he thinks he is. Perfectly pleasant, perfectly listenable but perfectly missable too. For a memoir, it seems as though it was pretty easy to write. Not a good sign. The more serious ending feels unearned. Shteyngart's memoir is as self-indulgent as most memoirs are, but it's refreshing that the author is aware of this and calls it out repeatedly. It's an interesting look inside the identity issues that come up for a child born in a different country from the one where they grow up. I mean, all of us have identity issues growing up, but to also be between two cultures and two languages seems really to turn the dial up. Life is a meaningless, aimless thing. Some memoirs do justice to life. Other books try to -- incessantly, frantically, hammering away with madness at the general fatuousness of daily living. Igor/Gary is of the latter kind. He's really trying to pour meaning and comedy into the first forty years of his life and, needless to say, his effort isn't entirely successful. It is an aimless, wild book itself, but not in the way that reflects real life -- more like in the way that writers try to connect the dots of life, doodling sticky webs of ink that smear and get all over your fingers. I never laughed out loud. I barely snickered. Maybe that's the problem I had -- I was promised the inability to hold water in my mouth, or in my bladder. But Gary was trying too hard. He tried exacting humor out of humorless things. His parents, in many ways too similar to mine, irritated me plenty -- and this book, as a sort of comic ode to them, mythologized their journey and their lives and their personalities in a way that bothered me. Sure, show me their lives in the USSR, but why are you constantly referring back to them in such a grandiose way? This is a pair of ordinary, extremely extremely flawed individuals, and maybe if this book had been entirely about them, I'd have liked it. But the book wasn't that. It was just a frazzly, blurry movement through this man's childhood, adolescence, maturation (or lack thereof.) It's kind of a normal life. I don't know why he'd need to write a memoir. He's also such a jerk sometimes. And his humor falls flat so often. Uch. The beginning was great. It promised the story of a man in his 20s (like me), liberal arts educated (like me), aspiring to writing success (a bit like me), parents who'd grown up under Soviet conditions (like me), but really feeling like a failure, without guidance, not sure where to go. It was well-written and the humor worked. But that didn't last, of course, unfortunately. Prix et récompensesDistinctionsListes notables
Biography & Autobiography.
Nonfiction.
Humor (Nonfiction.)
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Google Books — Chargement... GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyClassification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne:
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