Super Sad True Love Story by Shteyngart - Gary (2011) Paperback

Certainly this was an enjoyable reading experience...
until you got too the end. Like many postmodernists
striving to be 'hip,' there is no resolution or anything
that might qualify as a denouement.

I just finished reading 'Super Sad True Love Story.' It was great. There wasn't a boring character in the book -- Lenny, Eunice, their friends, parents, all the characters were people you wanted to discover more about.

Shteyngart's ideas on the future of the United States were scary. It seemed all too possible, in a warped kind of way. I thought this book would be more of a funny satire about cool people in New York City, but truly it was a very sad love story, and a scary story about how the world we know could fall apart. I don't know if the author would appreciate this comparison, but there were elements that reminded me of the book 'Life As We Knew It' (about society falling apart after a giant natural catastrophe).

Allow me to warn you that in Shteyngart's dystopian future, life can be kind of X-rated. Your average group of book-club ladies may be just too shocked to enjoy this. But I recommend it highly, if you have a sense of humor and if you ever worry about what our world may be coming to. It's original and you'll want to read it more than once!

While I think the concept is supposed to reflect the potential future downfalls of American culture, I found the story line to be a bit slow and didn't love the main characters. The "teen" conversations between Eunice and Grillbitch as well as her mother were my favorite.

Connect to shallow young adult feelings; connect to shallow middle age feelings; see revealed in the shallowness the sincere striving for dignity and meaning. The two lovers were mismatched and yet they connected; and so did I, with each of them.

The second, and saddest, love story is the depiction of the collapse of the USA under the weight of a capitalism and technology gone wrong, demanding that people serve it, to their own detriment. It is the collapse of this love that ultimately leads to the stress and collapse of Lenny and Eunice's improbable relationship.

I truly hated every second reading this book. This book is the equivalent of asking someone a simple yes or no question and getting a 5-page, MLA formatted, cursive font, sarcastic, out-of-ass response to something so simple. While the concept of the book sounded promising from the summary, I am sad to report that it was so painful to read. I have a rule that if I start a book, no matter how dull, boring, or grotesque it is, I finish it, but I am sorry to say that I could not finish this book. The writing is obnoxiously sarcastic, to the point where I would rather lose my ability to read than finish this book. Please Please Please, do not buy this and read it.

A sharply observed, bitter-sweet love story about the relationship between an unlikely couple. The book is perhaps most successful in its evocation of an apocalyptic New York in the near future after the collapse of the American economy.

My first Kindle purchase and a great one. Takes a while to warm up to the lexicon and format but the thing just works. Unlike other critics, I found the Russian, Jewish and Korean stereotypes to be hilariously apt for this type of satire. No sympathetic characters? I think that's part of the overall message..

My first Kindle purchase and a great one. Takes a while to warm up to the lexicon and format but the thing just works. Unlike other critics, I found the Russian, Jewish and Korean stereotypes to be hilariously apt for this type of satire. No sympathetic characters? I think that's part of the overall message..

Something like an updated 1984. This story was set in a believable version of the near future. The characters were funny exagerations of there present day counterparts, young people obsessed with beauty, older adults obsessed with being young. There is a very credible prediction of how our smart phone culture will pan out.
Enjoyable novel, a bit slow to get into at first, but I think it was worth the effort.
I do have one criticism: I'm not sure it was worth using the diary gimick. I think when authors use this format, they are trying to give their book a fresh and personal point of view, but I always find it slightly irritating. I don't think its realistic, it doesn't feel like you're reading someone's actual diary, just like a novel that has been tweaked here and there to sound slightly diary-like. Those little tweaks get on my nerves, they feel a bit forced.

This was a difficult-to-read, dystopian fable of America's near future, where sex and texting are the two primary preoccupations of those under forty. There are almost no likeable characters in the piece (an exception: one minor character who dies mysteriously at the end).

It basically takes much of existing modern society to the extreme. I found it extremely entertaining. Also, always a mark of a good book, I find myself thinking about it a lot since I put it down. I would highly recommend this book.

Shteyngart's new novel lacks the brilliance of his "Absurdistan" and much of the humor falls as flat as the imagination. Told mainly through quotations from diary entries and whatever technologically advanced form of email is transmitted by the ubiquitous "apparats" carried or worn by its characters in the near future, it is a somewhat slower and more frustrating read than one might expect. The satire is biting and ultimately frightening. The narrator is the familiar nebbish--a Woody Allen of the mid-21st century, complete with a Korean-American girlfriend. Her electronic communication with family and friends and her mother's messages to her are amusing and show good understanding of the culture, no doubt from the author's own family experience. By the last page, the reader's dominant feeling is that this is indeed a "sad, sad, sad" story.

In this alternate present or worst-case future, privacy, literacy and productive work no longer exist; and the worst sin is aging. Most reviews call this a satire. My definition of satire includes the trait funny. If there is a laugh in this novel I could not find it. Nor is there a love story worthy of the name. Like Orwell's "1984" this can be seen as a cautionary tale of where current trends might lead us.

Gary Shteyngart is a very talented writer, so I do not hesitate to recommend this book. However, if you find it interesting, you should get the "Absurdistan" - it is his best work, a real explosion of brilliance!

I was excited to start this book after hearing the author on the radio. As the story went on and it got a little too pathetic for me. I'd give it another try once the disappointment wears off. Maybe it was a turning point in the story. Otherwise, it was a very intriguing view of some bizzare future to come.

Wonderfully written social satire that foresaw the Occupy Movement. Shteyngart takes our obsessive social media over-sharing to its super sad low point and uses that and near-future political-employment-debt-immigration upheaval as a backdrop for a classic schlub-shallow siren romance.

I greatly enjoyed Super Sad True Love Story. The odd, social media obsessed, brave new world of the novel was riveting, the characters were intentionally a disconcerting mix of vapid, lovable, and misguided. The story is written incredibly well.

I won't get into the 1984esque world portrayed, but I think this is a story most anyone over the age of 25 will find interesting.

Unfortunately, about three quarters of the way through the novel, the author becomes a little bit transparent about his own views and the result is to take a phenomenal novel and make it mediocre.

After the major events of the book, it becomes apparent that everyone who is wrong is some right wing, big business embracing, screw the little guy type of capitalist and (arguably) the only person who is right is the artist type. This is just silly, and is unnecessarily distracting. The ignorant watch Fox news and it was government policies of spend, spend, spend that have run everything into the ground. This idea ignores the fact that BOTH political parties and both the left and right have had both equal turns and share equal blame in running down this country into the on the brink nation that we will potentially become. It is not only selling our souls to corporate america and selling out intellect to Twitter type updates that we have to fear, but the idea that spending, attending colleges that don't teach anything, and the avoidance of real problems in favor of made up ones (a point that is artfully made by Lenny's parents focus on gay marriage while the world is suffering) will doom us all.

Paying attention to only one half of the people that got us into this mess points to the author's inability to look in the mirror, as putting across characters that all hail from one side of the aisle shows a blind spot for the others that are pushing the problems (nationalized healthcare, neverending welfare, neverending stimulus) that are just as dangerous.

A harsh yet enormously funny satire of modern American life and the decline of human relationships in a technological age. You may be offended by reading this book... and if you are, that means you probably needed to read it.

(With apologies to David Sedaris.) In this book Shteyngart evokes a future United States governed by the Bipartisan Party and mired in a war with Venezuela, its currency pegged to the Chinese yuan: a brilliant mash-up of George Orwell and Jack Handey.

where is the movie? could not put this book down, so futuristic yet all about now! I enjoyed the journey this book took me on even as it grew more and more bizarre, it was grounded in real human emotion and frailties.

Mercy! Shteyngart's blend of hamfisted absurdism and confessional narrative make for an affecting read. I'm emotionally exhausted after powering through the novel in just a few afternoons. Equal parts sad and hilarious, I'm left fearing the collapse of our country while laughing at the vulgar culture that's practically begging for it to happen.

SSTLS might be bothersome to some readers because its vision of the future almost feels like wish fulfillment on the part of the author. Ultimately though, Shteyngart's failed America hits too close to the bone to be written off as the rant of a Jewish, NPR, liberal type, anxiously awaiting the downfall of our teetering empire. More than that, the novel feels like a eulogy to a beloved and distant New York that has been replaced by a Starbucks themed amusement park. That, and the fact that all the kids showed up with their iPhones and Twatters to make us feel old and irrelevant.

And for realsies, how was Hipster Runoff not listed on the acknowledgements page? This GlobalTeenspeak stuff is straight HRO. JBF Y'all.

If you think brand names like AssLuxury and JuicePussy are brilliant examples of satire that take aim at the sexualisation of culture then this might be the book for you. If on the other hand your prefer your satire to do more than target low hanging fruit and state the obvious, then you will probably dislike this book as much as I did. The brand names and other made-up terms like OnionSkin jeans might not have been so annoying if the author had mentioned them a few times only, but he seems so enamored by his own cleverness that he can't resist ramming them home again and again.

Not all of the satire is terrible and some of the ideas underlying the book had great potential. eg. a Bipartisan government. Unfortunately the execution of the story is so poor that they are swamped by self-indulgence. This is a very self-indulgent book. Eunice Park is a middle-aged man's fantasy with the maturity of a 15 year old. There's nothing remotely sad or moving about her and Lenny's "love" story. The author's attempt to give her some depth by making her care about the homeless and elderly was completely unbelievable.

The plot is incoherent and has nothing meaningful to say about the current political state because the dystopia is portrayed in such broad, simplistic strokes. The downfall of American society plays second-fiddle to Lenny's personal crisis, which revolves around the fact that he's old and fat and Eunice doesn't love him. More than anything else this is reads as an aging man's treatise against the young for leaving him behind. The story has no arc, it just rambles from one meaningless event to another ending in a great big pile of stupid. Avoid this one at all costs and read something worthwhile. To compare this book to classics such as 1984 and Farenheit 451 is a travesty.

This well written satire hooks you from the beginning, a smooth read which really makes you question where this world is heading. A new take on 1984 and just as good! I'll definitely be checking out Gary Shteyngart's other books!

First 1/4 of the book - I was unimpressed, thought the characters were boring and wondered why I was still reading. Next 1/4 of the book I became interested in the book's world/future history. The last half of the book was completely amazing - the characters and world around became a horrible/wonderful/sad/amazing/gut-wrenching journey in a future New York where both the people/city/tech were all uncomfortably plausible. This is a tough/great read!

This story is riveting, it takes the ugliest most pathetic parts of the human psyche and makes them the main component of discussion between the two lovers. Forcing the reading to confront their own ideals of love and mortality.

If Orwell had been a tiny, madcap Russian, he might have produced something like this instead of "1984." Like other great dystopian fiction, SSTLS projects a plausibly terrifying future that holds up an uncomfortable mirror to the present. The diquieting thing is how much of of Shteyngart's satirical vision of American around 2030 actually describes the America of 2010. I haven't read a funnier or more urgent novel in a very long time. You will look at things differently for at least a while after you read it.

I bought this book because of the promotional video with Paul Giamatti and the authot hitting on MILF's. I keep trying to read this book and it just seems to get worse and worse. The farther I get into the book the less interesting the story and characters get. There is this dystopian sci-fi element that is maybe interesting but doesn't really seem to come into play of the story much. Would not recommend.