$1.99 today....Shetyngart's debut novel is pretty funny. Vladimir Girshin, is lovable and comical as a Russian-Jewish immigrant....as are all the characters. Even the characters you don't like --are so stereotyped--you begin to like them too. Tongue-and-cheek stabs at political parties, and different nationalities. Guilty pleasure reading! If you like Philip Roth ... and other Shteyngart books... no reason you wouldn't enjoy this too -- when you're in the mood for a walk on the crazy & wacky sid...

IF YOU'RE GOING TO WRITE ABOUT PRAGUE, WRITE ABOUT PRAGUE! don't change a few letters, change a few names, turn alfonse mucha into someone else, but continue to refer to kafka as if you're forgetting this is supposed to be an imaginary place. what is this, CRACKED magazine? yes, i said CRACKED. not even MAD material, here.i wouldn't mind this annoyance if the book hadn't made me crazy in other ways. i can't stop reading a book if i'm far enough in, and unfortunately i didn't realize i hated this...

Four and a half stars.Highly funny, and as for the audiobook, Rider Strong (which is an awesome name) read it really well. In a part where they hire some DJ for their new super-pretentious dance club where horse tranquilizers are the new cocaine, as he is getting off the plane he yells, "MC Paavo in de haus!! In de pan-European 'hood! Got de Helsinki beat y'all can't fuck wif!"His accent was so hilarious that I kept rewinding to hear it again.I want to make it my new ring tone.

I found a dusty copy of this book lying unattended to on my mother's bookshelf, sandwiched between Updike and Dickens, believe it or not. I believe what drew me in was a blurb on the back comparing Shtyngart to Saul Below.Indeed, the plot is analogous to The Adventures of Augie March (and in fact, I think there are a couple of allusions to that great novel in Shtyngart's novel), but if you go into this one looking for something akin to the beauty and flawlessness of Bellow's prose, you'll be dis...

i found this tome to be fun...but vladimir girshkin is so unsympathetic a character, i found it difficult to really enjoy. i get the feeling that i'm supposed to see him as a farce, or a transatlantic everyman who happens to have amazing adventures...mostly i just see him as shallow and afraid. i particularly loathe the judgmental inner monologues, wherein he weighs people's coolness quotients by just how high they rank on the douchebag scale.i know it's supposed to be satire; i've just met too

I read Gary Shteyngart's debut novel at fever pitch because I started it late for a reading group discussion. Fever pitch was the correct approach; it matches the pace of the story.In the grand tradition of immigrant novels, Vladimir Girshkin is a young man of Russian descent adrift in a sea of confusion. He works at an immigrant resettlement agency in New York City, making non-profit wages. His girlfriend is a dominatrix by night, his father is an MC who scams Medicare, and his mother-well I ne...

I feel like I went on a date with this guy that everybody said I would totally love, and I don't want to be rude or anything but I'm really having a not-fun evening with him, I don't get the appeal, he seems like pretty much every other self-absorbed type telling his long long and not very interesting story (OH DOES YOUR MOTHER EXPECT TOO MUCH SUCCESS FROM YOU HOW SPECIAL AND UNIQUE TELL ME MORE), and I realized around page 250 out of 400 or so that as the book is not a human being it is not at

This book was a hoot. Shteyngart has a wonderful sense of the absurd, and his penchant for eccentric characters is the main selling point of this romp in New York and an Eastern European city that has all the chaotic vibrancy and despair of any city emerging from behind the Iron Curtain. Well worth it.

I feel like I've been reading a different book toeveryone else?! 'Satire of hipsters'?- maybe for about 10 pages, the rest just descended into the "comic" failures of Vladimir in the crime world... I was literally forcing myself to read up to certain pages, so in the end I quit. To be honest, I was turned off from the very first nine pages which were full of people saying how good the book was. If the book is so good, why does it need that? Very suspicious...I'm so disappointed, I have been want...

this was awesome and clever and hilarious. i described it to someone as hipster nabokov, which might sound off-putting, & there are parts that are SO clever and witty and hip that it verges close to making you start to hate it for its cleverness, but in the end it managed to keep me on its side. it was also witty enough to make me do really dorky things like transcribe a couple lines i liked. here they be:"Real humor is not supposed to be funny," Baobab said. "It's supposed to be tragic, like th...

The Russian Debutante's Handbook by Gary Shteyngart is a humorous fantasy about a Russian immigrant who is trying to find himself, and usually finds himself in hot water. The hero/narrator is one Vladimir Girshkin, who finds himself in a dead-end job and an unsatisfying relationship. He dreams for something better, but the advice of his friends leads him, on one hand, to Florida, where he infuriates a Catalan mobster by refusing to be his catamite. Then -- on the advice of a highly suspect Russi...

The Russian Debutante's Handbook is Gary Shteyngart's first novel, but the third I encountered—the fourth, actually, if you count his memoir Little Failure. Having now read all of Shteyngart's books to date—Absurdistan and Super Sad True Love Story as well—I can see that this first deep shaft Shteyngart sank into the metaphorical mine of his memory has rougher edges than its successors, but the same manic energy went into its construction.They're all of a piece, really, these books of his, snaps...

From the back of the book:"Breezily hilarious."-New York Magazine"Blisteringly funny."-Salon.com"Remarkable."-New York Observer"As funny and wicked as Waugh."-Time"Brilliant."-Harper's Bazaar"Terrifically charming."-Vanity Fair"A wholly original delight."-Entertainment Weekly"Energetic, sparkling."-Los Angeles Times"Not to be missed."-The Wall Street JournalReally? Seriously? Is it possible that this book is the author's own Cagliostro? Is it possible that all the lovers of this book (it won the...

"A knowledgeable Russian lazing around in the grass, sniffing clover and munching on boysenberries, expects that at any minute the forces of history will drop by and discreetly kick him in the ass. A knowledgeable Jew in a similar position expects history to spare any pretense and kick him directly in the face. A Russian Jew (knowledgeable or not), however, expects both history and a Russian to kick him in the ass, the face, and every other place where a kick can be reasonably lodged. Vladimir u...

Hmm... I think I might have enjoyed this book far less had I not been thrown into the (former) U.S.S.R. born immigrant community in Chicago for the brief period of time that I was. This book deals with all that interests me so much in that community - the courage to immigrate in the first place, the idealized American dream, the social disconnect that exists once immigrants arrive, the longing for for home, the misunderstanding of america, and the ultimate american question - what do you do when...

I loved the language in this book - the weird, fresh phrases and the author's obvious fascination with English words, their sound and their usage. This seems to be a common thread in books by smart Russian/Eastern European men writing in English, though I haven't read enough of these authors to make a reliable generalization. The language was enough to carry me pretty far, but I felt that there wasn't much more to this book than that. The beginning was excellent - when Vladimir is working at a c...

I bought this for 25 cents at a yard sale, and what a score that was... Steyngart’s humor bubbles up naturally from the ground, only fully carbonated and lime-flavored... I’ve seldom read a novel that gets underway so fast. He hits you right away with a barrage of breezy, antic, cutting observations, all cleverly slotted within a breakneck plot. (For relief from the pace, the narrator has a wistful and weary side; and there's an undercurrent of geopolitical awareness to also help temper the hype...

My ultimate credo: A story becomes literature when it transcends its genre. When it can seduce almost any reader, regardless of its plot, because the characters are so well crafted, the writing is seamlessly poetic, and nimble comedy keeps any tragedy from taking itself too seriously. Shteyngart's novel exceeds these expectations, having entranced a reader who previously found every mafia tale she'd ever encountered supremely nauseating. While a few classic features of mobster fiction can be fou...

As a former expatriate myself, I found this book to be comforting both in content and style. Being displaced in a foreign country is very amusing after the initial shock and confusion, the new country's idiosynchrasies clashing with your own. The reverse culture shock in coming back to the U.S. after being an expat in Europe is even more interesting than the original displacement, and this is observed and described in great detail and aptitude.

I had pretty high expectations going into reading The Russian Debutante’s Handbook. I read Super Sad True Love Story over the summer, and thought that Shteyngart’s writing in it was witty and direct, and his character development deeply humanizing. Lenny Abramov, the protagonist of Super Sad True Love Story, expresses his feelings so strongly and outwardly that it’s hard not to sympathize and identify with him. If Shteygart’s writing style were to be relatively constant between books then The Ru...