Super Sad True Love Story

A Novel

By: Gary Shteyngart

Narrated by: Ali Ahn, Adam Grupper

Length: 13 hrs and 17 mins

Publisher's summary

Gary Shteyngart, author of The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, creates a compelling reality in this tale about an illiterate America in the not-too-distant future. Lenny Abramov may just be penning the world’s last diary. Which is good, because while falling in love with a rather unpleasant woman and witnessing the fall of a great empire, Lenny has a lot to write about.

©2010 Gary Shteyngart (P)2010 Recorded Books, LLC

Critic reviews

"Shteyngart's earnestly struggling characters—along with a flurry of running gags—keep the nightmare tour of tomorrow grounded. A rich commentary on the obsessions and catastrophes of the information age and a heartbreaker worthy of its title, this is Shteyngart's best yet." ( Publishers Weekly)

"Full-tilt and fulminating satirist Shteyngart is mordant, gleeful, and embracive as he funnels today's follies and atrocities into a devilishly hilarious, soul-shriveling, and all-too plausible vision of a ruthless and crass digital dystopia in which techno-addled humans are still humbled by love and death." ( Booklist)

“It’s not easy to summarize Shteyngart; there’s so much satirical gunpowder packed into every sentence that the effect gets lost in the short version. But basically, this is a love story [that is] ridiculously witty and painfully prescient, but more than either of those, it’s romantic." ( Time)

Absolutely loved it

This was one of my favorite audio books I've listened to. The narration is wonderful, and the writing is excellent. It is funny, entertaining, sad, and disturbing.

Dystopia Now

Brilliant. I very much enjoyed Steyngart's Absurdistan, which satirized the former Soviet Union, but his writing reaches a whole new level here. This is a book about the near future America seems to be headed for, a country that's become a bankrupt, corporate-controlled police state on the verge of collapse, while mainstream Americans lead lives of vapid indifference, aggressively obsessed with youth, beauty, media profiles, and their rankings on a facebook-like service that publicly rates citizens on everything from their credit score to their "f***ability" (this is not a book for the prudish). It's very pointed satire, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, but often depressing because it's just close enough to reality.

Steyngart does a marvelous job with his two main characters: there's Lennie, a shlumpy, trod-upon 39 year old who works as a salesman at a life extension company, has a set of hilariously-rendered Russian immigrant parents who spend their day watching "Fox Liberty Ultra", hangs out with self-righteous hipster friends, and clings to his antiquated hobby of collecting old books in a post-literate era. He falls obsessively in love with Eunice Park, a young Korean-American woman who personifies much about Generation iPhone, with her short attention span, text message vocabulary, constant online shopping (for brands with names like "Juicy P***y"), and lifelong immersion in a culture of looks and casual sex, and who struggles with her own old-country parents (including a mom whose advice-filled, English-challenged emails are quite funny). Their relationship captures, in a rich way, so much about the America we're living in. Steyngart doesn't take the easy path of simply mocking his self-absorbed characters (flawed though they are), but gives them them earnest voices, making them people we empathize with as the artificial bubbles of their worlds burst. Perhaps, in part, because it could soon happen to us.

Funny, depressing, sweet, and frightening all at once.

sci-fi wifi

Loved this book. Great stuff, highly entertaining and very original. Superb narration by two readers, nuanced and both enhance the story. A future not so distant. You'll need to be an iphone user with plenty of apps to really understand and benefit from what is going on. Comedy, tragedy, pathos; all there. Takes some focus to listen to. The sex writing is in your face, so faint of heart beware...would definitely be an awkward moment in car with spouse; but the cartoonish sexuality of it is important and imparts an edge - and is nowhere near the pornography of the ever so real and pending Entertainment Tonight/Haliburton life this novel captures. Recommend for those looking for something fresh.

Obsessive listening

This was my first audio book. I thought the narrators were great - I appreciate the use of a man and a woman to tell this story as it cycles between their point of view. The book is a wry look at the future, but so close to now it's like you can see it coming. It's not an unhopeful story, in general, but it is sad at the end. What I liked most is: it made me think about love, government, technology, aging. There's a lot of humor relating to those issues here, but it's got an undercoating of sad truth to it.

Another Great Book

Super Sad True Love Story is a fabulously interesting and fun look at a world run amok by technological enhancements. The characters are endearing and have you cheering for their success amid the chaos in which they live. Shteyngart's witty writing makes this a delicious adventure.

Thought provoking and entertaining

Super Sad Love Story is just that and more to include futuristic history, relationships and humanity.
The performances were great. My husband and I listened together during road trips and we both enjoyed it.

Not as good or as funny as Absurdistan

I bought this book because I enjoyed Gary Shteyngart's previous book Absurdistan so much. Unfortunately I didn't like Super Sad True Love Story nearly as much. I felt that it lacked much of the biting satirical humor of Absurdistan and was mostly just depressing. I found the characters unlikable, and the mood of the book was sort of a cross between "1984" and the most annoying/depressing aspects of a Woody Allen movie.

Scathing glimpse of where we might be headed

Despite its dumb title, this is a very intelligent and scary glimpse of life in America in about 2020. The hero is a schlubby Jewish NYU grad, similar to a Woody Allen hero or the protagonist of Sam Lipske's The Ask, who can't really manage life in a hyper-capitalist-materialist America where the US dollar has lost most of its value, your sex appeal and credit rating are instantly displayed on iPhone-type apps as soon as you walk into a bar, and women walk around in see-through clothing.

Curiously, there is a prescient Occupy Wall Street-type movement that goes on throught the story. The novel's fears???that the generation growing up now will be utterly vacuous and materialistic and allow the US to crumble??? seem a little dated only 3 years after it was written. At least I hope they do.

Readers are OK. Ali Ahn is trying to sound like a vapid young woman, and that's more annoying than amusing.

A Novel For The 99%

This book is a well-written and preformed warning, one that we need to take seriously. Set in an undefined near-future, Shteyngart paints a portrait of a dystopia we are already teetering on. In the book, the US is dominated by a totalitarian bureaucracy that is desperately trying to keep it's economy afloat with complex financing schemes that remain incomprehensible to most Americans (sound familiar?). The day to day world is dominated by a computer that everyone carries with them, clogged with useless facts and celebrity gossip. "News" is opinion, and the principle opinion that matters is your ranking that is constantly being updated by a mysterious algorithm. Our hapless hero, Lennie, falls for the "ideal" girl—a young, slim Asian woman, obsessed by fashion and her ranking. The affair is doomed (I'm not giving anything away, it's in the title), yet Shteyngart manages to keep us involved and invested in the story.

Ali Ahn does a great job preforming the role of the self-absorbed Eunice Park. Adam Grupper as Lennie has a much more difficult task (Lennie is a bit of a schlimazel), yet rises to it quite well. Eunice grows a little bit during the course of the book - she is very young, after all. But Lennie, nearing 40, still hasn't learned to question his surroundings or his choices — he stands as a warning to us all.

I was surprised to read the reviews of others who seemed to think nothing happens in the second half of the book. This is the part where everything comes to a head; the affair of the main title reaches it's inevitable end, a major character comes to a Brazil-like end, the dystopian society crumbles in spectacular fashion. This book is haunting and memorable—one of the best listens of the year for me.

A little too meandering for my taste

What did you like best about Super Sad True Love Story? What did you like least?

I liked the overall concept of the story. I least liked the minutia, which I understand was meant to color the story, but I felt I had to just bear it until the story progressed again.

Would you recommend Super Sad True Love Story to your friends? Why or why not?

I would recommend it to some friends; to the ravenous readers that enjoy consuming all novels.

What do you think the narrator could have done better?

I thought the narration was well done.

Could you see Super Sad True Love Story being made into a movie or a TV series? Who should the stars be?

No

Any additional comments?

This was a pleasant way to spend some summer hours.