From Russia with Lox
Absurdistan
By Gary Shteyngart
Random House. 333 pages. $32.95.
Memoirs of a Muse
By Lara Vapnyar
Random House. 212 pages. $32.95.
The end of the Cold War may have been neither as sudden nor as gruesome as the end of the Second World War, but for the conflict’s losers, and particularly residents of the former Soviet Union, it was no picnic. Some found themselves stuck at home, disempowered by oligarchs and jeopardized by civil unrest, while others — many of them Jewish — optimistically hopped planes to places like Newark or Toronto, only to discover that mechanical engineering degrees and intimacy with Pushkin entitled them to nothing better in North America than driving a taxi. New novels by Gary Shteyngart and Lara Vapnyar, young writers born in the Soviet Union and now based in New York City, offer guided tours of the fleeting exuberance and enduring frustrations of such post-Soviet adventures. (more…)