Here is how the book jacket describes itself:
Open Absurdistan and meet outsize Misha Vainberg, son of the 1,238th-richest man in Russia, lover of large portions of food and drink, lover and inept performer of rap music, and lover of a South Bronx Latina whom he longs to rejoin in New York City, if only the American INS will grant him a visa. But it won't, because Misha's late Beloved Papa whacked an Oklahoma businessman of some prominence. Misha is paying the price of exile from his adopted American homeland. He's stuck in Russia, dreaming of his beloved Rouenna and the Oz of NYC.
Salvation may lie 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.
Populated by curvaceous brown-eyed beauties, circumcision-happy Hasidic Jews, a loyal manservant who never stops serving, and scheming oil execs from a certain American company whose name rhymes with Malliburton, Absurdistan is a strange, oddly true-to-life look at how we live now, from a writer who should know.
Here is how I describe the book:
The book was a practically a disaster; senselessly profane as it is painful to read. While surely some measure of artistry was necessary to have stretched such an uninspired satire into 333-pages of filth, only a true dullard would find occasion to be impressed.
The story is told from the perspective of a morbidly obese pig-man who possesses the intellect of a lobotomized chihuahua. This vacuous ogre of a protagonist, Misha Vainberg, dawdles away life by lavishing over-sized indulgences upon himself, pissing away his deposed father's fortune. The highlights? A highly detailed botched-circumcision, repeatedly massaging the puss-filled abscess in his gut, sleeping with his step-mother in the wake of his father's assassination, engaging in coitus with his bloated Bronx-stripper girlfriend, and rapping some sick verses that would put Tom Wolfe to shame.
The only value in this book is in its social observations; critiquing the divisive nature of religion, portraying the depravity of impoverished states, illustrating the implications of western influences and the associated propensity towards corruption. Such topics would be more effectively addressed in an essay format rather than obscured by cover-to-cover smut.
Really, it boils down to the fact that this was just a boring wank-a-thon. Boring. I can see how people would be impressed with this book though, since Shteyngart can emulate all of the writing styles of every single polular Russian writer of the past two centuries. Ok, dude, I get it, you can write like Tolstoy and Nabokov, I get it.
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