Gary Shteyngart: 'Little Failure'

Review: GARY SHTEYNGART: melancholic slapstick failuchka (Satis Shroff)

The room in the Altwiehre Bahnhof was full and a bearded American author of Jewish-Russian descent, a professor of creative writing from Columbia University, walked in and took his place behind the table with the microphones and a silly, old lamp.

‘It’s great to be back in Freiburg,’ he said and realized that he actually didn’t see his audience. He put the table-lamp aside and said,’ Now I see you.’

He brought out some photographs from his memoir ‘Little Failure’ and said, ‘ The photos are the best thing in the book. Here’s a snap of me: ‘boy with a toy car.’

So how do you become a writer? He said Brooklyn is full of writers.

He went on to imitate Robbie Williams’ ‘Good Morning Vietnam,’ except this time it was ‘Good Evening, Leningrad.’

You know, my grandma said, ‘Hey, you wanna be a writer? For every page you write you’ll get a cheese. Russian cheese.’

Then he went on to tell a story about a goose. Lenin murders the goose and eats it at the end of the story. And flips to 1978, when President Jimmy Carter and Breznev reached a deal: US grain in exchange for Russian fruit juice.

Gary Shteyngart’s mother used to call her son ‘Failuchka’ in a semi-tender and half-rude manner, which means ‘Little Failure.’

It was thought that Gary would literally develop into a Little Failure in life when he grew up, whose ancestors died either in Hitler’s or Stalin’s concentration camps. Far from being a little failure, Gary became a star author, who was dubbed as a writer bestowed with humour, a post-modern George Orwell. His memoir bears the same title.

It’s 1980 and the Ronald Reagan times were bad. Gary wears a Russian parka, cracks a joke about new kid-on-the-block playing with him only ‘when you’re furless.’

It’s 1981 and the family receives one of the scams in American lottery, in which you’re declared a prize winner in big letters. There’s a big excitement in the Russian family.

‘Mom! Papa! We’ve won. We’re millionaires!’

They start watching X-rated films and learn to pay allegiance to the American flag. But life isn’t funny when you only have a 400-word vocabulary. Gary buys five issues of glossy mags and other ones with the thought that the $10 million will flutter in one of these days.

The family’s plea during meals is: ‘Please help us get the $10 million.’

Gary doesn’t know how kissing works at that age. But his eyes are for the lovely blondes from his school from rich, mainstream families.

As though to start the procedure of migration with its integration and assimilation, he starts repeating what disappointed migrants to a new country do by deriding their own former countries.

‘In Russia the government tells us lies. But we couldn’t believe America would do the same.’

He gets emphatic I his behavior and says: ‘Send us the $ 10 million now!’

He sees the Porsche coupe of his fellow Americans.

Gary’s father says about his son: ‘He’s gonna make money with his head.’

He thinks about his parents with their Jewish voices and amazing Russian accent and comes to the conclusion: ‘Maybe writing can help me.’

So he starts writing science fiction. In his American school there’s a substitute teacher named Miss Ass, who comes to his class and asks the pupils whether they’d written anything on their own.

‘I’ve even written my own novel,’ says little Gary.

The teachie asks him: ‘Novel? May I read it?’

Gary replies: ‘Yes, I will brink it.’

Now Gary is obliged to read from his novel in front of the class. He is excited and brings out a fast, garbled version of his book. The teachie is patient with him, tells him to slow down, read slowly. And the whole class has to listen to him.

In the end Gary says: ‘God bless these kids for giving me a chance.’

‘I lost my Russian with 14 and thinks a girl should say she’s half in love with him at least, but nothing happens.

The scene changes to sunny Florida: sunshine state, and Gary talk about the attraction of the town.

As a child, he says: ‘You come from Moscow. Imagine how it’ll be when I eat a big Hamburger, with a vivid, highly developed cockroach which bears the Latin name Periplaneta Americana.

The ones from the Nepalese, Indian corner creeps under the name of Blatta orientalis.

The memoir of his youth is studded with slapstick and melancholy, which are only a few words apart. Gary S. weaves the feeling of being rootless and depicts the narrowness of a small family together a mélange of olde Soviet memories. The boyish dreams of going to the beach and saying, ‘Oh, hi there!’ to the beauties of his own age doesn’t work out. He’d love to make a grande impression but realizes that his fingerprint on the green card, and his freckled face don’t suffice to impress those posh, mainstream US-girls.

Then he imagines how  it’ll be when he eats a hamburger and comes to the conclusion: ‘everywhere we go, we are just onlookers from behind the fence.’

To his shame, his mom packs out the homemade Russian meal they’ve brought with them. There they are eating their red beet salad in America where a lot of people go out dining with their families to McDonalds, Starbucks or Pizza Palaces.

Gary feels ashamed of the Russianness of his parents.

In Germany too we have a similar expression: you can’t plant old tree.

 He wants to keep himself at a distance from his parents and what they represent. But he can’t afford to do that, after all they are his own parents.

At this stage the parents crack jokes about their son’s strange behavior in America. You lose your job if you can’t master the English language.

This is a case similar to that of the Syrian and other refugees in Germany with the language and other barriers that have to be overcome.

It hurt to be a poor and Russian in America. His parents’
 idea of a weekend was to go to their dilapidated dacha in Massachussets (New England, USA).

‘For my mom, I wasn’t even a human being,’ he says.

In those days he used to read Issac Assimov’s science fiction stories. If he didn’t like his mother’s cooking, she’d say,’ I want to see how far you can get along without eating.’

He’d retort with, ‘I’ve got $ 35 in my pocket and on his way back home alone, his bag goes kaput and he has to walk 8km. But at home he’s alone and can watch 240 hours of television after taking off his sticky, sweaty clothes.

When the parents call after 10 days he realizes that his eyes are red with TV-watching. He’s become a lonesome settler in a new country. Gary is trying to master the Americanization process on a big and small scale. It dawns upon him that the American lottery is a big scam and his dream of the American Dream is shattered.

He says, ‘We were always more apart. We don’t have television at the beginning, no access to America.

One day his father mentions Lenin to his American colleague.

‘Lennon’s okay but Paul McCartney’s better.’

Gary the author mentions that he gets along well with students and writers with Indian and African accents at Columbia University.

His book is humorous and seems to fit into the American culture. It’s just a book from the point of view of a Russian writer, but a writer who knows what his American publishers and readers want to read and hear from a Jewish-Russian migrant.

‘A book has to entertain and humour is carried over by the ICBM, which is the medium of comedy,’ says Gary.

Then he goes on to relate about the USA in 1905 and the Austro-Hungarian Jewish family ‘Migrants leave inside stories of being pressed by the society.

Germany has a lot of refugees in the country. Will they be pressed by the society? They have to learn the difficult language, how about the integration? Who are the people who come to Germany. What are the political implications in a town like Freiburg, a country like Germany, and the EU. What sort of help do the refugees now and in the long run?

‘Wir schaffen das,‘said Chancellor Merkel. Her welcome-culture has caught the world unawares.

Gary describes the USA as a consumer society with an explosion of media and people addicted to consumerism. For immigrants, it isn’t easy to raise kids in New York and Manhatten, where money defines everything.

He says, ‘Donald Trump talks of winners and losers in the American society.’

The immigrants have to work hard and are mostly the poor people and says: ‘We were the only parents without a helicopter.’

Gary grows older and wants to be a hard core conservative like Ronald Reagan. This makes things hilarious: from Communism to Reaganism. Russians want to believe in big things and aren’t pleased with small things.

He gets to hear: we will conquer Mars. In reality we can’t even cross the breadline.

It’s 1988 and Gary has become a Republican, and the elections are on with George W. Bush and Dukakis. The scenario is a hotel ballroom, a liberal Massachussets Greek (Dukakis) and the American Republic victory party.

‘Tonight I’ll meet Jane from the Republican mainstream. There’s cheering and laughter on the stage and he sees the lovely blonde women. He imagines one of the blondes make a come-hither sign. Ah, which will be my Jane?

He approaches the beauties only to discover that he’s been mistaken for the waiter.

The following week he’s an advocate in Russia. It’s 1999 in a country where everything’s categorized, and says laconically: ‘I have drunk vodka with a Moscovite policeman who had tears in his eyes.’

He takes a train from Mosow to Leningrad (St. Petersburg) where he drinks some more and puts himself in a cupboard.

A fellow passenger, who finds him there, remarks: ‘You’re really drinking the Russian way.’

So you have a 38 year old Jewish-Russian American who wants to write his memoir.

Actually, you write a memoir when you’ve lived your life, till you’re over 60 or 70 years.

It’s early summer and he has booked rooms for himself and his parents, but finds out that his room hasn’t been prepared by the hotel staff. He constantly fears that he has to protect his parents, who are between 60 to 70 years old. The hotel has cheap furniture and he takes Lorzepam to give himself a smooth, chemical sleep.

His parents are two slender persons and his father says: ‘Welcome in English to a car driver and the hotel staff. In the USA he speaks Russian and in Russia English.

‘In the last 12 years I’ve tried not to care about my Russian upbringing but to listen to my parents, who have an eternal migrant mentality.’

His father tells him: ‘Igor, you look good. Terrible rings around your eyes. What are those lines on your forehead?’

‘Wrinkles,’ replies the son.

Gary’s fear is to die earlier than his parents.

Schönheit brauch ihre Zeit, he says.

Gary’s Dad says: ‘My life is interesting because I have worked in many places and met a lot of people.’

His ancestors have been either killed in Hitler’s or Stalin’s concentration-camps. Today there are elegant shopping areas with Sushi Sunshine and people with digital cameras everywhere.

‘The town makes us sad, says his Dad as he points to one of the windows in  Petersberg and says: ‘My first love used to live up there.’

Waited for two hours for a coke in a long line, and someone else snapped it.

Then he talks about the life of a new kid in American and the wonders of an ad with a box of cereals. His Dad’s a lively figure and sounds like a magical transformer. Since his book has not yet been translated into Russian, it is assumed that his parents haven’t read it. But Gary says in the writing process his parents were very much involved when he interviewed them for long periods. His father says he’d spent part of his twenties in that mental asylum. He recalls that soldiers had died in the Front. His friends also died.

His parents had turned anger into sadness, and he observed them as a sad, melancholic pair because they never had a chance in life. His Dad had wanted to be an opera singer, perhaps at the Bolshoi.

The next generation will have to do better, was his refrain, as are the refrains of the former guest-workers in Germany, the boat-people from Vietnam, Balkan war refugees, and now the Syrian refugees who come to a new land with high hopes and no knowledge about the language, customs and norms of a foreign, host country.

Kids fall in love with cereal boxes in the west because they are cleverly stuffed with prizes. Honeycomb shows a healthy white kid, a license plate for your bike. It’s all about wanting something, and have it. You learn to make your choice in the USA at an early age. The choice taken or not, shapes your life.

One day a thin, scrappy neighbor catches his eye. She has only one eye and keeps falling from her old bike, which is in bad shape like his own. She sees his bike and emits a ‘Hi, Michigan!’

How lucky one must be to live there, and eventually talks about American Jewish writers becoming a voice and mentions Phillip Roth. And mentions that there are only 70,000 waiting to be discovered by the mainstream publishing media.

‘In New York we all have our psychiatrists and spend a lot of time with our head-shrinkers,’ he says.

A lady in the audience wants to know about the genre of his memoir. The answer is: a white trader betrays his motherland. In the USA the ‘tell-all’ memoir is taken seriously. Follow me on Twitter, please..

His memoir is a strong work of fiction, says Gary.

‘In the USA about 60% of the books are novels and 90% are true memoirs. Yes, we want to tell the truth in America, nothing but the truth,’ says Gary with a grin.

He has written four books.

‘When I went to Ohio University they looked at my body, and had to make a decision which course I should take and they said: ‘Writer, not dancer.’

Next book?  Why did you write a novel with 40?

‘I wanted to get rid of my autobiographical stuff. My next novel will be about a 30 year old female who works for a Hedge Fund.

Immigration literary fiction is a big thing in the USA. Then there’s Jewish literature. We also have Jhumpa Lahiri, whose latest book ‘The Lowland’ resembles a mosaic, artfully pieced together and reveals painful emotions (Literary Review), and writers from Korea. In Germany 60% of Anglo-American books translated into German, but in America the percentage of translations is very low.  Immigrants have a rarefied atmosphere and reception with stories from Bengal and Leningrad stories coming to America.

A book allows you to enter the mind of a person, like what could be technologically better than book and audio versions by people from all over the world?

Vocal Fry was then touched upon by a tall blonde in her German English. She’d been listening to a US radio-programme and was disgusted with ‘Local Fry.’

Gary Shteygart replied with a feigned: ‘Oh-my-God!’ and said it was mostly west coastal language changes, and was more confined to females than males. He himself brings different local lingo and accents into his reading performance, like a speech-gesang that you can’t analyse. Akin to instagrams.

‘It costs $65,000 to do Creative Writing at Columbia University, NY, and I must mention that Gertrude Stein was a MFA,’ says Gary.

He even admitted that he’d featured in a movie with the title ‘Rage’ in which he played the role of an Orthodox Jew and went on to say, ‘Being a Russian Jew was the worst thing that could happen to you, because you’ve had the holocaust. As a child I wanted to destroy things.’

How’s it now, you might think.

‘When you get older, you love Nature,’ he says and becomes mellow He finds Nature in Manhatten and says, ‘I talk with birds.’

‘Thant’s pantheism!’ squeals a female voice.

‘Yes, I’m a New York Jewish-Russian. Or a Russian Jew.

Gary Shteyngart, who lives in NY, was born in St. Petersburg (Leningrad) in 1972, and emigrated to the USA at the age of 7. He published  the novels: A Handbook for Russian Debutants, Snack Daddy’s Adventurous Journey and Super Sad True Love Story (translated into 40 languages).

Another from the Freiburger Writers Group asks him: ‘Could you give us some words of wisdom on how to become a writer?

Gary Shteyngart replied:’You can get it. Move to New York. The first thing you have to do it to find your VOICE. Figure out who you are. Constantly take notes. Write what you see around you. Everything. That’s what you do as a writer.

After that we went for a swig in the nearby pub in Wiehre Altbahnhog and talked some more.