Reading time: Less than 1 minute
I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about the metaphorical language of Gary Shteyngart…
Gary Shteyngart was born in Leningrad in 1972 and moved to the United States in 1979. He is the author of the novel Super Sad True Love Story, which won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize and was selected as one of the best books of the year by more than forty news journals and magazines around the world, including the New York Times.
A satiric and dystopic love story, the book focuses on middle-aged Lenny Abramov — who is obsessed with living forever — and 20something Korean-American Eunice Park. The story is told in their alternate voices — Lenny’s diary entires in one chapter, Eunice’s online messages in the next. This correspondence reveals their views of modern day America and underscores the shortcomings of the information age. Shteyngart’s wicked sense of humour and running gags keep the book moving briskly.
Here are my two favourite metaphors from the book:
- There was an earplug lying slug-dead on an empty chair.
- Outside, the southern moon, pregnant and satisfied, roosted atop the outreached palm trees of Piazza Vittorio.