gary shteyngart: giving it up for two covers, a spine, and at least 40 pages

i remember hearing about the literary kerfuffle surrounding Gary Shteyngart and book blubs a while back. the way i recall it, it happened a few years ago, but the Google tells me that it happened as recently as last year. it started (or maybe, restarted?) back in august when A.J. Jacobs, author of the frequently funny nonfiction”humble quest” books like The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible*, wrote an article for the new york times book review. the article was about copious book blurbing, and you can’t write an article about copious book blurbing without mentioning Shteyngart, the godfather/whore (choose your own adjective) of book blurbing.

so, if you don’t already know, the deal is that Shteyngart loves to blurb books. well okay, he doesn’t love it, but he also doesn’t like saying no when he’s asked to write one. so the long and short of it is that he’s blurbed a lot of books. like a lot. like over a hundred. and they’re blurbs, so they’re positive. and nobody trusts you if you’re positive about a lot of books. Shteyngart’s blurbs are doubly problematic because they’re not just positive, but exuberantly positive. See blurb of Aravind Adiga’s White Tiger (“An exhilarating, side-splitting account of India today, as well as an eloquent howl at her many injustices. Adiga enters the literary scene resplendent in battle dress and ready to conquer. Let us bow to him.”)

some people have wondered whether Shteyngart even reads the books he blurbs. others have wondered if his blurbs are glowing just because they’re his friends’ books (he must have a lot of friends). me, well i‘ve always wondered what the big deal was. are people buying books based on blurbs alone? i‘ve been known to read blurbs just like the next gal, but if i‘m looking at a book, it’s because i‘m already interested it. i might be persuaded to go ahead and buy it if more than one author whose writing i enjoy or reviewer whose taste i respect has something nice to say. but i‘m not going to buy it just because Gary Shteyngart (or A.J. Jacobs) alone said it was good. it’s one of the few cases in my life where quantity matters more to me than content. so again i ask, what’s the big deal? especially when, let’s face it, the blurber is so damn good at it? See blurb of Patrick DeWitt’s The Sisters Brothers (“DeWitt’s dirty realism makes me want to roll in the mud with him.”). if tweeting book reviews paid (good) money, Shteyngart would make a killing.

so, obviously i don’t get the whole fascination with Shteyngart and his book blurbs. but i still thought this Ed Champion-produced mini-documentary about the whole thing was pretty great. it’s tongue-in-cheek funny with a hint of serious exploration. kind of like a Shteyngart blurb.

in case you were wondering, here’s a link to the Gary Shteyngart blurbs tumbler.

* Jacobs also wrote The Know-It All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World (which i read back in ’05 and thoroughly enjoyed, from what i remember) and, most recently, Drop Dead Healthy: One Man’s Humble Quest for Bodily Perfection. Jacobs should call his books “the perfect man” trilogy. i suspect that Jacobs’ light-hearted writing masks a much more profound cultural statement about our fascination with mental, spiritual, and physical perfection. there’s always something both silly and sad and maybe a little hopeful (can he do it? can he really do it?) about Jacobs’ endeavors. after all, they’re really just a magnification of what many of us try to do every day, especially this time of year: try to live a little better, and move a little further down the path to perfection.

Jacobs takes the idea of self-improvement to the extreme. in so doing, he forces us to ask, is it worth it? really worth it? buddists would probably say no. i don’t know what i think. i‘m curious about what Jacobs thinks. i think i might finally be ready to finish The Year of Living Biblically, which I abandoned with intent to return years ago.

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