A meandering look at a very specific lockdown experience
I had not read any Gary Shteyngart prior to this. Although the majority of the prose is eloquent, it requires a certain type of reader who is able to engage with long, run-on sentences that last a whole paragraph.
The writing is undeniably smart - there's a section about climbing a seemingly never-ending staircase and you experience it in a way that hammers home the metaphor - and there were two points when I was genuinely shocked, which is something that seems to infrequently happen whilst reading at the moment.
I don't know if, like the characters, I got a kind of Stockholm syndrome during the reading process as for the latter half I was more excited and intrigued by the goings on of this world.
I have no issues with the timing of the novel, or the 'political correctness' of this novel, but I think I'm just not the right audience for this particular book.
The writing is undeniably smart - there's a section about climbing a seemingly never-ending staircase and you experience it in a way that hammers home the metaphor - and there were two points when I was genuinely shocked, which is something that seems to infrequently happen whilst reading at the moment.
I don't know if, like the characters, I got a kind of Stockholm syndrome during the reading process as for the latter half I was more excited and intrigued by the goings on of this world.
I have no issues with the timing of the novel, or the 'political correctness' of this novel, but I think I'm just not the right audience for this particular book.