Summary of Gary Shteyngart's Little Failure

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 I graduated college in 1996, and that same year, I worked as a paralegal for a civil rights law firm. I was not cut out for the law, and I never will be. My parents were disappointed in me, and so was I.
#2 I would spend hours at the Strand Book Annex, searching for someone just like me on the back cover of a book. I was looking for the sloppy turn of phrase or the MFA cliché that would mark the book inferior to the one gestating in my office computer.
#3 I was in love with a woman who had already criticized my bookshelves for containing material that was either too lightweight or too masculine. I had spent four years after college without so much as kissing a girl. I was lonely.
#4 I began to panic when I thought about the girl I loved at the time. I saw her as a censor of my bookshelf and my tastes, and I thought about how she was taller than me and her gray teeth.

Sujets

• Love
• Love (disambiguation)
• Personal Memoirs
• Biography
• Autobiography

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 03 mai 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669399285
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Gary Shteyngart's Little Failure
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5 Insights from Chapter 6 Insights from Chapter 7 Insights from Chapter 8 Insights from Chapter 9 Insights from Chapter 10 Insights from Chapter 11 Insights from Chapter 12 Insights from Chapter 13 Insights from Chapter 14 Insights from Chapter 15 Insights from Chapter 16 Insights from Chapter 17 Insights from Chapter 18 Insights from Chapter 19 Insights from Chapter 20 Insights from Chapter 21 Insights from Chapter 22 Insights from Chapter 23 Insights from Chapter 24 Insights from Chapter 25
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

I graduated college in 1996, and that same year, I worked as a paralegal for a civil rights law firm. I was not cut out for the law, and I never will be. My parents were disappointed in me, and so was I.

#2

I would spend hours at the Strand Book Annex, searching for someone just like me on the back cover of a book. I was looking for the sloppy turn of phrase or the MFA cliché that would mark the book inferior to the one gestating in my office computer.

#3

I was in love with a woman who had already criticized my bookshelves for containing material that was either too lightweight or too masculine. I had spent four years after college without so much as kissing a girl. I was lonely.

#4

I began to panic when I thought about the girl I loved at the time. I saw her as a censor of my bookshelf and my tastes, and I thought about how she was taller than me and her gray teeth.

#5

The author went to the church in the book, which was a pink baroque ornament in Stalin-era beige. The interior was crammed with a young boy’s delight: maquettes of gallant eighteenth-century fighting ships.

#6

I missed my father, who was in the Soviet military, that summer. I was excited to see how much healthier and stronger people were in the south, but I was also confused by their Slavic appearance.

#7

I am a child of five in a subterranean vacation hut, and I am holding in my hands a holy scribbled letter, written in my father’s clumsy childish script. As I am reading it, I am speaking the words aloud, and as I am speaking them aloud, I am lost in the ecstasy of connection.

#8

My father wanted to emigrate to the West, and he wanted me to swim to Turkey. Turkey was across the Black Sea, but we were in the Soviet Union, so we couldn’t go there.

#9

My father, who had spent the previous thirty years hating the Soviet Union, devoted the next thirty to loving America. But we hadn’t left the country yet. And I, a fan of the Red Army, was not allowed to know what my father knew: that everything I loved was untrue.

#10

I was 27 years old in 1999, and I had returned to my hometown of Petersburg, Russia, for the first time in 20 years. I was employed as a grant writer for a Lower East Side charity, and I had a girlfriend who didn’t have a boyfriend. I was desperate to find out if the metro still had the comforting smells of rubber, electricity, and unwashed humanity.

#11

I was able to finally leave Russia after four days, but I was still nervous about going back to the country. I was afraid that I would be refused permission to emigrate, and would become a refusenik like my parents had been.

#12

I am standing in the Fulton Street Strand, holding St. Petersburg: Architecture of the Tsars, the book that I had been reading for the past few weeks. I am turning to page 90, where the event happened.
Insights from Chapter 2

#1

I am born hungry. I want to eat the world, and I can never be satiated. My parents are too dissimilar to marry successfully. The Soviet Union is supposed to be a classless society, but my father is a village boy and my mother is from the Petersburg cultural class.

#2

I was born in Leningrad in 1951, and I was sick with asthma from the moment I was born. But I was also surrounded by the strange, unbidden beauty of being a sickly child.

#3

My father, a village man, was there to hold my mouth open with a spoon so that the air could get into my lungs. He was scared and frustrated, but he did what he could to help me.

#4

I am a curious child, and I am excited to learn Russian. I am also worried about the lack of air inside me, and I try to breathe but cannot. I do not know other children, but I know that I am all wrong as a boy.

#5

I was born a Jewish person, but the blood coursing through my veins is mostly Yasnitsky and Shteyngart. I was scared of everything because I was born a Jewish person.
Insights from Chapter 3

#1

Thanksgiving 2011 was a family gathering in my mother’s house in Little Neck, Queens. My father was born in Russia, and he and my mother were both devoted readers of Russian author Leo Tolstoy. I joined them on the couch, seeking shelter from the extended family.

#2

I can calculate my father’s stare from almost any distance on earth. He is very proud of his physique and, conversely, critical of mine, but on this Thanksgiving he does not look as rod thin and athletic as usual.

#3

I used to be more open with my father, but now I know how much pain I can inflict with each book I publish that does not extol the State of Israel. I want to stay with my father and make him feel better, but I also want to go home to Manhattan.