Word: misha
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...many novels feel tidy, as if the world were neatly divisible into East and West, good and bad. Absurdistan is not tidy, nor is its hero: grotesquely obese Misha Vainberg, a rich young Russian obsessed with New York City. Misha is trapped (for legal reasons) in his homeland, and his longing--plus vodka--powers this endlessly inventive, lugubriously funny post-Soviet picaresque...
...heads to the volatile region to save his feathered friend. There, he ends up slaving for a Chechen boss in a makeshift crematorium that is the region's only neutral zone because it accommodates the dead from both sides of the conflict. Although he eventually returns home with Misha, Viktor and the penguin soon have to flee from a Kiev mafia boss turned parliamentarian. Their escape route involves a yacht trip to Argentina with a Bosnian-Serb family wanted as war criminals. Luckily for Misha, Argentina boasts islands inhabited by birds of his breed. After stints in Ukraine and Chechnya...
Thirty-year-old Misha Borisovich Vainberg, the hero of Absurdistan, is in every way and dimension an exaggerated character: grossly fat, filthy rich, loudly sentimental and operatically miserable as only a Russian can be. Vainberg lives in St. Petersburg, but his spiritual home is America, which he adores beyond all reason. Unfortunately, he's stuck in Russia because of trouble with the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. Pines Misha: "I am an American impounded in a Russian's body...
...Misha is a stateless being, trapped between a fantasy America and a debased post-Soviet Russia ("a nation of busybody peasants thrust into an awkward modernity") that he regards with an Oedipal mixture of love and contempt. East and West play a hilarious game of Telephone in his head--he's obsessed with hip-hop, and he and his best friend have formed an awful duo called the Gentlemen Who Like...
...same way Gatsby chased Daisy, Misha chases his imagined America--with perfect, pure good faith, going further and further out on a limb until he's the only true believer in sight. He is, of course, doomed to be disillusioned and heartbroken--the novel ends hopefully, but the dateline is early morning, Sept. 11, 2001. Still, there's no doubt that he will reillusion himself again, repeatedly, as many times as necessary. He believes in America unshakably, sentimentally, incorrigibly--the way only a Russian...