The first stop in Gary Shteyngart’s author tour for his new novel “Absurdistan” (Random House, 333 pages, $24.95) will be Milwaukee. “And it’s all downhill from there,” he quipped in a recent telephone interview.
The Russia-born Shteyngart has been here before, touring to promote his first novel “The Russian Debutante’s Handbook.” And that made him “a big fan. I love this whole part of the country.”
Shteyngart — who will speak at the Harry W. Schwartz Bookshop in Shorewood on Monday, May 8 at 7 p.m. — said he likes the food, especially the “German cuisine” that could give him “an all sausage diet.”
He also loves the Milwaukee Art Museum’s wing designed by Santiago Calatrava, and is “angry” that New York City, where he lives, can’t seem to get such projects “off the ground.”
Yet Shteyngart appears to have — or, perhaps, to have had — a certain ambivalence about this country, one that fuels his satirical sense of humor. A New York Times Magazine feature article about him in June 2002 said, “Shteyngart has never been able to embrace fully his identity as an American.”
His first novel, the article states, “is a rambunctious satire that upends one of the most solemn traditions in American literature: the immigrant novel.”
Shteyngart acknowledged that his first years in the U.S. — he came with his family in 1979, when he was seven years old — were “not a happy time” for him.
“I guess that the Soviet Union when you are very young is a nice place to grow up in before you attain a political consciousness,” he said. His memories include “nice vacations and books” and “a very nice sense of being a part of something.”
But “in America, the situation changed.” Because his parents only spoke Russian at home, “I didn’t lose my accent until I was older.” He also went to a Hebrew school where he felt “befuddled by everything.”
Yet his identity as both a Russian immigrant and as a Jew also influenced his literary ambitions, he said. It was in Hebrew school that he wrote his first satire, a parody of the Torah that he admitted was what one might expect from “an 11-year-old kid being smutty.”
As he grew older, his discovered American Jewish literature by such authors as Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, and admired how their books were “emotionally heavy but at the same time observant of details” and were suffused with satirical humor that is “Jewish influenced.”
In fact, American Jewish literature “in some way is the literary culture of the 20th century,” he said. “Being part of this culture is fascinating.”
Shteyngart also has been visiting Russia regularly since he graduated from college. In fact, it was while he was “hanging out there” in the summer of 2001 that he began to write “Absurdistan.”
The satirical novel tells of Misha Vainberg, a Jewish and overweight immigrant from Russia, who attends the funeral of his gangster father in St. Petersburg and then is denied permission to return by the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
In the course of his struggle to return to the U.S., Vainberg ends up in the tiny, oil-rich (and, of course, fictional) new republic of Absurdistan, where he encounters government officials, businesspeople, “Mountain Jews,” war, corruption and conniving.
Vainberg also encounters the endemic and ubiquitous Russian anti-Semitism. “When you’re Jewish in Russia, people let you know about it all the time,” Shteyngart said. “Russia to this day is very anti-Semitic and very obsessed about Jews,” and that “influenced the way the main character looks at the world.”
After this, Shteyngart said he may want “to write about America” for his next project. He is particularly thinking about New York state outside of New York City as a setting, particularly the capital city of Albany.
“I like cities that have seen their glory fade a little bit,” he said. “Albany is a particularly interesting place for me. It looks almost like a provincial city in Russia.”
However, “it lacks Milwaukee’s cuisine,” he said.
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