In 1979, seven-year-old Igor Shteyngart and his family left Leningrad in the U.S.S.R., their ultimate destination a one-bedroom apartment in Queens, N.Y. Nearly 35 years later, Gary Shteyngart is the author of three critically praised and popular novels and a star among his generation of writers. Little Failure is the story of that frequently improbable journey, told with honesty and generous helpings of off-kilter wit.
Shteyngart wrote his first "novel," Lenin and His Magical Goose, at age five, trading words for slices of cheese from his maternal grandmother. At age 10, he discovers "there is nothing as joyful as writing," a calling he pursued with passion through his college days at Oberlin, where ingesting copious quantities of alcohol and drugs never seemed to dull his creative energies, and from there to being a published writer in 2002.
As much as Little Failure is the story of Shteyngart's rocky road to assimilation, it's equally an account of his often fractious relations with his parents. His father, an engineer and passionate lover of Israel and fishing, provided the book's title, one of the epithets he dished out with relish. Shteyngart's mother specialized in administering the silent treatment, including what he calls "one especially long period of making me unexist." The book's final chapter is a moving description of his return with his parents to St. Petersburg in 2011, a trip that reveals some startling family secrets.
Acerbic and tender, at times brutally funny and at others painfully sincere, Little Failure is a fully satisfying companion to the novels of a writer who doubtless has many more captivating stories, invented and real, to share. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer