{"product_id":"absurdistan-isbn-9780812971675","title":"Absurdistan","description":"“\u003ci\u003eAbsurdistan\u003c\/i\u003e is not just a hilarious novel, but a record of a particular peak in the history of human folly. No one is more capable of dealing with the transition from the hell of socialism to the hell of capitalism in Eastern Europe than Shteyngart, the great-great grandson of one Nikolai Gogol and the funniest foreigner alive.”\u003cbr\u003e–Aleksandar Hemon\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFrom the critically acclaimed, bestselling author of\u003ci\u003e The Russian Debutante’s Handbook\u003c\/i\u003e comes the uproarious and poignant story of one very fat man and one very small country\u003cbr\u003eMeet Misha Vainberg, aka Snack Daddy, a 325-pound disaster of a human being, son of the 1,238th-richest man in Russia, proud holder of a degree in multicultural studies from Accidental College, USA (don’t even ask), and patriot of no country save the great City of New York. Poor Misha just wants to live in the South Bronx with his hot Latina girlfriend, but after his gangster father murders an Oklahoma businessman in Russia, all hopes of a U.S. visa are lost.\u003cbr\u003eSalvation lies in the tiny, oil-rich nation of Absurdistan, where a crooked consular officer will sell Misha a Belgian passport. But after a civil war breaks out between two competing ethnic groups and a local warlord installs hapless Misha as minister of multicultural affairs, our hero soon finds himself covered in oil, fighting for his life, falling in love, and trying to figure out if a normal life is still possible in the twenty-first century. \u003cbr\u003eWith the enormous success of\u003ci\u003e The Russian Debutante’s Handbook,\u003c\/i\u003e Gary Shteyngart established himself as a central figure in today’s literary world—“one of the most talented and entertaining writers of his generation,” according to\u003ci\u003e The New York Observer\u003c\/i\u003e. In\u003ci\u003e Absurdistan,\u003c\/i\u003e he delivers an even funnier and wiser literary performance. Misha Vainberg is a hero for the new century, a glimmer of humanity in a world of dashed hopes.\u003cb\u003eGary Shteyngart\u003c\/b\u003e is the \u003ci\u003eNew York Times \u003c\/i\u003ebestselling author of the memoir \u003ci\u003eLittle Failure \u003c\/i\u003e(a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist) and the novels \u003ci\u003eSuper Sad True Love Story\u003c\/i\u003e (winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize),\u003ci\u003e Absurdistan, \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eThe Russian Debutante’s Handbook\u003c\/i\u003e (winner of the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction)\u003ci\u003e. \u003c\/i\u003eHis books regularly appear on best-of lists around the world and have been published in thirty countries.1\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The Night in Question\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    June 15, 2001\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e      I am Misha Borisovich Vainberg, age thirty, a grossly overweight man with  small, deeply set blue eyes, a pretty Jewish beak that brings to mind the  most distinguished breed of parrot, and lips so delicate you would want to  wipe them with the naked back of your hand.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    For many of my last years, I have lived in St. Petersburg, Russia, neither  by choice nor by desire. The City of the Czars, the Venice of the North,  Russia’s cultural capital . . . forget all that. By the year 2001, our St.  Leninsburg has taken on the appearance of a phantasmagoric third-world  city, our neoclassical buildings sinking into the crap-choked canals,  bizarre peasant huts fashioned out of corrugated metal and plywood  colonizing the broad avenues with their capitalist iconography (cigarette  ads featuring an American football player catching a hamburger with a  baseball mitt), and what is worst of all, our intelligent, depressive  citizenry has been replaced by a new race of mutants dressed in studied  imitation of the West, young women in tight Lycra, their scooped-up little  breasts pointing at once to New York and Shanghai, with men in fake black  Calvin Klein jeans hanging limply around their caved-in asses.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The good news is that when you’re an incorrigible fatso like me—325 pounds  at last count—and the son of the 1,238th richest man in Russia, all of St.  Leninsburg rushes out to service you: the drawbridges lower themselves as  you advance, and the pretty palaces line up alongside the canal banks,  thrusting their busty friezes in your face. You are blessed with the  rarest treasure to be found in this mineral-rich land. You are blessed  with respect.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    On the night of June 15 in the catastrophic year 2001, I was getting  plenty of respect from my friends at a restaurant called the Home of the  Russian Fisherman on Krestovskiy Island, one of the verdant islands caught  in the delta of the Neva River. Krestovskiy is where we rich people  pretend to be living in a kind of post-Soviet Switzerland, trudging along  the manicured bike paths built ’round our kottedzhes and town khauses, and  filling our lungs with parcels of atmosphere seemingly imported from the  Alps.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The Fisherman’s gimmick is that you catch your own fish out of a man-made  lake, and then for about US$50 per kilo, the kitchen staff will smoke it  for you or bake it on coals. On what the police would later call “the  night in question,” we were standing around the Spawning Salmon pontoon,  yelling at our servants, drinking down carafes of green California  Riesling, our Nokia mobilniki ringing with the   social urgency that comes only when the White Nights strangle the  nighttime, when the inhabitants of our ruined city are kept permanently  awake by the pink afterglow of the northern sun, when the best you can do  is drink your friends into the morning.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Let me tell you something: without good friends, you might as well drown  yourself in Russia. After decades of listening to the familial agitprop of  our parents (“We will die for you!” they sing), after surviving the  criminal closeness of the Russian family (“Don’t leave us!” they plead),  after the crass socialization foisted upon us by our teachers and factory  directors (“We will staple your circumcised khui to the wall!” they  threaten), all that’s left is that toast between two failed friends in  some stinking outdoor beer kiosk.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “To your health, Misha Borisovich.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “To your success, Dimitry Ivanovich.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “To the army, the air force, and the whole Soviet fleet . . . Drink to the  bottom!”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I’m a modest person bent on privacy and lonely sadness, so I have very few  friends. My best buddy in Russia is a former American I like to call  Alyosha-Bob. Born Robert Lipshitz in the northern reaches of New York  State, this little bald eagle (not a single hair on his dome by age  twenty-five) flew to St. Leninsburg eight years ago and was transformed,  by dint of alcoholism and inertia, into a successful Rus-  sian biznesman renamed Alyosha, the owner of ExcessHollywood,   a riotously profitable DVD import-export business, and the swain   of Svetlana, a young Petersburg hottie. In addition to being bald,  Alyosha-Bob has a pinched face ending in a reddish goatee, wet blue eyes  that fool you with their near-tears, and enormous flounder lips cleansed  hourly by vodka. A skinhead on the metro once described him as a gnussniy  zhid, or a “vile-looking Yid,” and I think most of the populace sees him  that way. I certainly did when I first met him as a fellow undergraduate  at Accidental College in the American Midwest a decade ago.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Alyosha-Bob and I have an interesting hobby that we indulge whenever  possible. We think of ourselves as the Gentlemen Who Like to Rap. Our  oeuvre stretches from the old-school jams of Ice Cube, Ice-T, and Public  Enemy to the sensuous contemporary rhythms of ghetto tech, a hybrid of  Miami bass, Chicago ghetto tracks, and Detroit electronica. The modern  reader may be familiar with “Ass-N-Titties” by DJ Assault, perhaps the  seminal work of the genre.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    On the night in question, I got the action started with a Detroit ditty I  enjoy on summer days:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Aw, shit\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Heah I come\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Shut yo mouf\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    And bite yo tongue.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Alyosha-Bob, in his torn Helmut Lang slacks and Accidental College  sweatshirt, picked up the tune:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Aw, girl,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    You think you bad?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Let me see you\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Bounce dat ass.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Our melodies rang out over the Russian Fisherman’s four pontoons (Spawning  Salmon, Imperial Sturgeon, Capricious Trout, and Sweet Little Butterfish),  over this whole tiny man-made lake, whatever the hell it’s called (Dollar  Lake? Euro Pond?), over the complimentary-valet-parking-lot where one of  the oafish employees just dented my new Land Rover.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Heah come dat bitch\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    From round de way\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Box my putz\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Like Cassius Clay.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Sing it, Snack Daddy!” Alyosha-Bob cheered me on, using my Accidental  College nickname.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    My name is Vainberg\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I like ho’s\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Sniff ’em out\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Wid my Hebrew nose\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Pump that shit\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    From ’round the back\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Big-booty ho\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Ack ack ack\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    This being Russia, a nation of busybody peasants thrust into an awkward  modernity, some idiot will always endeavor to spoil your good fun. And so  the neighboring biznesman, a sunburned midlevel killer standing next to  his pasty girlfriend from some cow-filled province, starts in with “Now,  fellows, why do you have to sing like African exchange students? You both  look so cultured”—in other words, like vile-looking Yids—“why don’t you  declaim some Pushkin instead? Didn’t he have some nice verses about the  White Nights? That would be very seasonal.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Hey, if Pushkin were alive today, he’d be a rapper,” I said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “That’s right,” Alyosha-Bob said. “He’d be M.C. Push.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Fight the power!” I said in English.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Our Pushkin-loving friend stared at us. This is what happens when you  don’t learn English, by the way. You’re always at a loss for words. “God  help you children,” he finally said, taking his lady friend by one  diminutive arm and guiding her over to the other side of the pontoon.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Children? Was he talking about us? What would an Ice Cube or an Ice-T do  in this situation? I reached for my mobilnik, ready to dial my Park Avenue  analyst, Dr. Levine, to tell him that once again I had been insulted and  injured, that once again I had been undermined by a fellow Russian.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    And then I heard my manservant, Timofey, ringing his special hand bell.  The mobilnik fell out of my hand, the Pushkin lover and his girlfriend  disappeared from the pontoon, the pontoon itself floated off into another  dimension, even Dr. Levine and his soft American ministrations were  reduced to a distant hum.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    It was feeding time.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    With a low bow, manservant Timofey presented me with a tray of blackened  sturgeon kebabs and a carafe of Black Label. I fell down on a hard plastic  chair that twisted and torqued beneath my weight like a piece of modern  sculpture. I bent over the sturgeon, sniffing it with closed eyes as if  offering a silent prayer. My feet were locked together, my ankles grinding  into each other with expectant anxiety. I prepared for my meal in the  usual fashion: fork in my left hand; my dominant right clenched into a  fist on my lap, ready to punch anyone who dared take away my food.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I bit into the sturgeon kebab, filling my mouth with both the crisp burnt  edges and the smooth mealy interior. My body trembled in-  side my leviathan Puma tracksuit, my heroic gut spinning counter-  clockwise, my two-scoop breasts slapping against each other. The usual  food-inspired images presented themselves. Myself, my Beloved Papa, and my  young mother in a hollowed-out boat built to resemble a white swan  floating past a grotto, triumphant Stalin-era music echoing around us  (“Here’s my passport! What a passport! It’s my great red Soviet  passport!”), Beloved Papa’s wet hands rubbing my tummy and skirting the  waistband of my shorts, and Mommy’s smooth, dry ones brushing against the  nape of my neck, a chorus of their hoarse, tired voices saying, “We love  you, Misha. We love you, bear cub.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    My body fell into a rocking motion like the religious people rock when  they’re deep in the thrall of their god. I finished off the first kebab  and the one after that, my chin oily with sturgeon juices, my breasts  shivering as if they’d been smothered with packets of ice. Another chunk  of fish fell into my mouth, this one well dusted with parsley and olive  oil. I breathed in the smells of the sea, my right fist still clenched,  fingers digging into palm, my nose touching the plate, sturgeon extract  coating my nostrils, my little circumcised khui burning with the joy of  release.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    And then it was over. And then the kebabs were gone. I was left with an  empty plate. I was left with nothing before me. Ah, dear me. Where was I  now? An abandoned bear cub without his li’l fishy. I splashed a glass of  water on my face and dabbed myself off with a napkin Timofey had tucked  into my tracksuit. I picked up the carafe of Black Label, pressed it to my  cold lips, and, with a single tilt of the wrist, emptied it into my gullet.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The world was golden around me, the evening sun setting light to a row of  swaying alders; the alders abuzz with the warble of siskin birds, those  striped yellow fellows from our nursery rhymes. I turned pastoral for a  moment, my thoughts running to Beloved Papa, who was born in a village and  for whom village life should be prescribed, as only there—half asleep in a  cowshed, naked and ugly, but sober all the same—do the soft tremors of  what could be happiness cross his swollen Aramaic face. I would have to  bring him here one day, to the Home of the Russian Fisherman. I would buy  him a few chilled bottles of his favorite Flagman vodka, take him out to  the farthest pontoon, put my arm around his dandruff-dusted shoulders,  press his tiny lemur head into one of my side hams, and make him  understand that despite all the disappointments I have handed him over the  past twenty years, the two of us are meant to be together forever.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Emerging from the food’s thrall, I noticed that the demographics of the  Spawning Salmon pontoon were changing. A group of young coworkers in blue  blazers had shown up, led by a buffoon in a bow tie who played the role of  a “fun person,” breaking the coworkers up into teams, thrusting fishing  rods into their weak hands, and leading them in a chorus of “Fi-ish!  Fi-ish! Fi-ish!” What the hell was going on here? Was this the first sign  of an emerging Russian middle class? Did all these idiots work for a  German bank? Perhaps they were holders of American MBAs.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Meanwhile, all eyes fell on a striking older woman in a full-length white  gown and black Mikimoto pearls, casting her line into the man-made lake.  She was one of those mysteriously elegant women who appeared to have  walked in from the year 1913, as if all those red pioneer scarves and  peasant blouses from our jackass Soviet days had never alighted on her  delicate shoulders.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I am not enamored of such people, I must say. How is it possi-  ble to live outside of history? Who can claim immunity to it by dint of  beauty and breeding? My only consolation was that neither this charming  creature nor the young Deutsche Bank workers now shouting   in unison “Sal-mon! Sal-mon!” would catch any tasty fish today. Beloved  Papa and I have an agreement with the management of the Home of the  Russian Fisherman restaurant—whenever a Vainberg takes up a rod, the  owner’s nephew puts on his Aqua-Lung, swims under the pontoons, and hooks  the best fish on our lines. So all Czarina with the Black Pearls would get  for her troubles would be a tasteless, defective salmon.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    You can’t ignore history altogether.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    On the night in question, Alyosha-Bob and I were joined by three lovely  females: Rouenna, the love of my life, visiting for two weeks from the  Bronx, New York; Svetlana, Alyosha-Bob’s dark-eyed Tatar beauty, a junior  public-relations executive for a local chain of perfume shops; and Beloved  Papa’s twenty-one-year-old provincial wife, Lyuba.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I must say, I was anxious about bringing these women together (also, I  have a generalized fear of women). Svetlana and Rouenna have aggressive  personalities; Lyuba and Rouenna were once lower-class and lack  refinement; and Svetlana and Lyuba, being Russian, present with symptoms  of mild depression rooted in early childhood trauma (cf. Papadapolis,  Spiro, “It’s My Pierogi: Transgenerational Conflict in Post-Soviet  Families,” Annals of Post-Lacanian Psychiatry, Boulder\/Paris, Vol. 23, No.  8, 1997). A part of me expected discord among the women, or what the  Americans call “fireworks.” Another part of me just wanted to see that  snobby bitch Svetlana get her ass kicked.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    While Alyosha-Bob and I were rapping, Lyuba’s servant girl had been making  the girls pretty with lipstick and pomade in one of the Fisherman’s  changing huts, and when they joined us on the pontoon, they reeked of fake  citrus (and a touch of real sweat), their dainty lips aglow in the summer  twilight, their teeny voices abuzz with interesting conversation about  Stockmann, the celebrated Finnish emporium on St. Leninsburg’s main  thoroughfare, Nevsky Prospekt. They were discussing a summer special—two  hand-fluffed Finnish towels for US$20—both towels distinguished by their  highly un-Russian, shockingly Western color: orange.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Listening to the tale of the orange towel, I got a little engorged down in  the circumcised purple half-khui department. These women of ours were so  cute! Well, not my stepmother, Lyuba, obviously, who is eleven years  younger than me and happens to spend her nights moaning unconvincingly  under the coniferous trunk of Beloved Papa, with his impressive turtlelike  khui (blessed memories of it swinging about in the bathtub, my curious  toddler hands trying to snatch it).\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    And I wasn’t hot for Svetlana, either; despite her fashionable   Mongol cheekbones, her clingy Italian sweater, and that profoundly  calculated aloofness, the supposedly sexy posturing of the educated  Russian woman, despite all that, let me tell you, I absolutely refuse to  sleep with one of my co-nationals. God only knows where they’ve been.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    So that leaves me with my Rouenna Sales (pronounced Sah-lez, in the  Spanish manner), my South Bronx girlie-girl, my big-boned precious, my  giant multicultural swallow, with her crinkly hair violently pulled back  into a red handkerchief, with her glossy pear-shaped brown nose always in  need of kisses and lotion.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “I think,” said my stepmom, Lyuba, in English for Rouenna’s benefit, “I  thought,” she added. She was having trouble with her tenses. “I think, I  thought . . . I think, I thought . . .”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I sink, I sought . . . I sink, I sought . . .\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “What are you sinking, darling?” asked Svetlana, tugging on her line  impatiently.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    But Lyuba would not be so easily discouraged from express-  ing herself in a bright new language. Married for two years to the 1,238th  richest man in Russia, the dear woman was finally coming to terms with her  true worth. Recently a Milanese doctor had been hired to burn out the  malicious orange freckles ringing her coarse nubbin, while a Bilbao  surgeon was on his way to chisel out the baby fat flapping around her  tufty teenager’s cheeks (the fat actually made her look more sympathetic,  like a ruined farm girl just coming out of her adolescence).\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “I think, I thought,” Lyuba said, “that orange towel so ugly. For girl is  nice lavender, for boy like my husband, Boris, light blue, for servant  black because her hand already dirty.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Damn, sugar,” Rouenna said. “You’re hard-core.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “What it is ‘harcourt’?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Talking shit about servants. Like they got dirty hands and all.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “I sink . . .” Lyuba grew embarrassed and looked down at her own hands,  with their tough provincial calluses. She whispered to me in Russian,  “Tell her, Misha, that before I met your papa, I was unfortunate, too.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Lyuba was poor back in 1998,” I explained to Rouenna in En-  glish. “Then my papa married her.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Is that right, sister?” Rouenna said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “You are calling me sister?” Lyuba whispered, her sweet Russian soul  atremble. She put down her fishing line and spread open her arms. “Then I  will be your sister, too, Rouennachka!”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “It’s just an African-American expression,” I told her.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “It sure is,” Rouenna said, coming over to give Lyuba a hug, which the  temperate girl tearfully reciprocated. “ ’Cause, as far as I can tell, all  of you Russians are just a bunch of niggaz.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “What are you saying?” Svetlana said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Don’t take it the wrong way,” Rouenna said. “I mean it like a compliment.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “It’s no compliment!” Svetlana barked. “Explain yourself.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Chill, honey,” Rouenna said. “All I’m saying is, you know . . . your men  don’t got no jobs, everyone’s always doing drive-bys whenever they got  beefs, the childrens got asthma, and y’all live in public housing.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Misha doesn’t live in public housing,” Svetlana said. “I don’t live in  public housing.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Yeah, but you’re different from the other peeps. You’re all like OGs,”  Rouenna said, making a ghetto gesture with her arm.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “We’re what?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Original gangsters,” Alyosha-Bob explained.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Look at Misha,” Rouenna said. “His father killed an American businessman  over some bullshit, and now he can’t get a U.S. fucking visa. That’s,  like, hard-core.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “It’s not all because of Papa,” I whispered. “It’s the American consulate.  It’s the State Department. They hate me.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Again, what it is ‘harcourt’?” Lyuba asked, unsure where the conversation  was heading and whether or not she and Rouenna were still sisters.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Svetlana dropped her line and turned on me and Alyosha-Bob with both hands  on her negligible waist. “It’s your fault,” she seethed in Russian. “With  all of your stupid rapping. With that idiot ghetto tech. No wonder people  treat us like we’re animals.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “We were just having fun,” Alyosha-Bob said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “If you want to be a Russian,” Svetlana told my friend, “you have to think  of what kind of image you want to project. Everyone already thinks we’re  bandits and whores. We’ve got to rebrand ourselves.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “I apologize with all my soul,” Alyosha-Bob said, his hands symbolically  covering his heart. “We will not rap in front of you from now on. We will  work on our image.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Damn, what are you niggaz going on about?” Rouenna said. “Speak English  already.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Svetlana turned to me with her fierce off-color eyes. I stepped back,  nearly tipping over into the Spawning Salmon waters. My fingers were  already skirting Dr. Levine’s emergency speed dial when my manservant,  Timofey, ran up to us in great haste, choking on his own sour breath. “Ai,  batyushka,” my manservant said, pausing for air. “Forgive Timofey for the  interruption, why don’t you? For he is a sinner just like the rest of  them. But sir, I must warn you! The police are on their way. I fear they  are looking for you—”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I didn’t quite catch his meaning until a baritone yelp from the  neighboring Capricious Trout pontoon caught my attention. “Police!” a  gentleman was braying. The young bank workers with their American MBAs,  the old czarina in her black pearls and white gown, the Pushkin-loving  biznesman—everyone was making for the complimentary valet parking where  their Land Rovers were idling. Running past them were three wide  gendarmes, their snazzy blue caps embossed with the scrawny two-headed  Russian eagle, followed by their leader, an older man in civilian  clothing, his hands in his pockets, taking his time.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    It was apparent that the pigs were headed squarely for me. Alyosha-Bob  moved in to protect me, placing his hands on my back and my belly as if I  were in danger of capsizing. I decided to stand my ground. Such an  outrage! In civilized countries like Canada, a well-heeled man and his  fishing party are left in peace by the authorities, even if they have  committed a crime. The old man in civvies, who I later learned had the  tasty name of Belugin (just like the caviar), gently pushed aside my  friend. He placed his snout within a centimeter of my own, so that I was  looking into a grizzled old man’s face, eyes yellow around the pupils, a  face that in Russia bespeaks authority and incompetence both. He was  staring at me with great emotion, as if he wanted my money. “Misha  Vainberg?” he said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “And what of it?” I said. The implication being: Do you know who I am?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Your papa has just been murdered on the Palace Bridge,” the policeman  told me. “By a land mine. A German tourist filmed everything.”National Bestseller; Author of The Russian Debutante's Handbook; [quote]--Time One of the 10 Best Books of the Year The New York Times Book Review","brand":"Random House Trade Paperbacks","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46301542154469,"sku":"NP9780812971675","price":21.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780812971675.jpg?v=1767721009","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/absurdistan-isbn-9780812971675","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}