Beautiful book, at turns funny and sad, reminds me of Daniel Pinkwater. This one is not for young readers, though. Can one person change the world? Will the overweight clueless antihero find happiness? Delivered with astute social comentary that skewers both sides of the iron curtain, Jews, Gentiles and Halliburton (Golly Burton). With a chilling reference to "9/11" thrown in with extreme nonchalance.
Quotes:
This is a book about love. [...]
This is also a book about too much love. It’s a book about being had. [...]
This is a book about love. But it’s also a book about geography.
capitalist iconography (cigarette ads featuring an American football player catching a hamburger with a baseball mitt)
This is what happens when you don’t learn English, by the way. You’re always at a loss for words.
“If you want to be a Russian,” Svetlana told my friend, “you have to think of what kind of image you want to project. Everyone already thinks we’re bandits and whores. We’ve got to rebrand ourselves.”
Papa. I’m stuck in this horrible country because you killed a businessman from Oklahoma, and all I can do is remember how you once were; to commemorate the life of a near-saint, this is the burden of your only child.
I naturally settled my gaze on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, those emblematic honeycombed 110-story giants that glowed white gold in the afternoon sun. They looked to me like the promise of socialist realism fulfilled, boyhood science fiction extended into near-infinity.
See, when you’re cultured, being middle class is enough.
It was a shtetl funeral, in many ways, a kind of impromptu klezmer act minus the musical instruments.
I’ll always associate self-laundered socks with democracy and the primacy of the middle class.
Let me give you an idea of this Jerry Shteynfarb. He had been a schoolmate of mine at Accidental College, a perfectly Americanized Russian émigré (he came to the States as a seven-year-old) who managed to use his dubious Russian credentials to rise through the ranks of the Accidental creative writing department and to sleep with half the campus in the process. After graduation, he made good on his threat to write a novel, a sad little dirge about his immigrant life, which seems to me the luckiest kind of life imaginable. I think it was called The Russian Arriviste’s Hand Job or something of the sort. The Americans, naturally, lapped it up.
I was having some kind of Dostoyevsky moment. I wanted to redeem everyone in sight.
Whatever you may think of Judaism, Lyuba, in the end it’s just a codified system of anxieties. It’s a way to keep an already nervous and maligned people in check.
Words have consequences.
I tried to go to sleep, but there was nothing to dream about, except the usual Eastern European nonsense about a man sailing an inflatable Fanta bottle around the world looking for happiness.
Everything has its limits!
I turned to the window to watch our plane follow the curves of the Danube as the orderly Austrian houses with their peaked roofs and backyard swimming pools turned into the housing projects surrounding the stumpy castle of Bratislava, Slovakia, which in turn gave way to the melancholy buildup of Budapest
A passing T-62 had begun to rotate its barrel our way, like a slow child trying to make friends.
I put on a pair of gigantic square sunglasses and slipped into my roomiest vintage tracksuit, the one that prodded my stomach forward and held it prominently in place, so that altogether I resembled the infamous North Korean playboy Kim Jong Il. It was time, as Dr. Levine would say, to go for a walk.
“Think one person can change the world, Misha?” he said at last. “Yes,” I said. “I really do. Do you?”
Who would I like to be when I grew up? This was a question that haunted people of my generation well into their forties.
Like any empire in decline, ours was becoming ever more brilliant at knocking things apart, at raising palls of smoke over cratered school yards and charred market stalls.
Even among the most thoroughly secular and unaffiliated young Jews, the Holocaust enjoys great name recognition.
I thought I was Differrent and had a Special Story to tell but I guess I’m not and I dont.
The towers that had risen over the city as a watermark of Euro-American civilization were work hives and nothing more. As quickly as they had been put together, they could be taken apart.
“I know a fairy tale,” the girl said in her syrupy little girl’s voice. “It’s about a fishee that gets caught in the sea and then the fisherman plucks the fishee’s eyes out so she can’t swim back, and then he cuts her stomach open to take out the caviar—”
“I am very honored,” he said. “The Jewish people have a long and peaceful history in our land. They are our brothers, and whoever is their enemy is our enemy also. When you are in Absurdsvanï, my mother will be your mother, my wife your sister, and you will always find water in my well to drink.”
“We’re not required to love it,” Dror said of Israel. “Just to make sure it exists.”
‘Think Bosnia’ became everyone’s motto. ‘How can we make this place more like Bosnia?’ I mean, you’ve got to hand it to Halliburton. If Joseph Heller were still alive, they’d probably ask him to be on their board.”
Good morning, respected passenger! Today is Monday, September 10, 2001
You’ve done me wrong, Rouenna. It’s okay. I’ll do you wrong, too. I can’t change the world, much less myself. But I know that we are not meant to live apart.
Oh, my sweet endless Rouenna. Have faith in me. On these cruel, fragrant streets, we shall finish the difficult lives we were given.
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