Our Country Friends book pdf download for free or read online, also Our Country Friends pdf was written by Gary Shteyngart.
Gary Shteyngart was born in Leningrad in the year 1972 and came to the United States seven years later. His first novel, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, won the Stephen Crane Award for First Work of Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction.
| Book | Our Country Friends |
| Author | Gary Shteyngart |
| Language | English |
| Size | 2.5 MB |
| Pages | 319 |
| Category | Novel |
Our Country Friends Book PDF download for free
In the rolling hills of upstate New York, a group of friends and friends of friends gather at a farmhouse to wait out the pandemic. Over the next six months, new friendships and romances take root, while old betrayals surface, forcing each character to re-evaluate who she loves and what matters most to her.
The unlikely cast of characters includes a Russian-born novelist; his Russian-born psychiatrist; her precocious child who is obsessed with K-pop; a struggling Indian-American writer; a highly successful Korean-American app developer; a global dandy with three passports; an essayist’s southern flamethrower; and a movie star, the actor whose arrival upsets the balance of this chosen family.
Both elegiac and very, very funny, Our Country Friends is the most ambitious book to date from the author of the bestselling Super Sad True Love Story.
Our Country Friends Book Pdf Download
Here’s a great example of what happens when a brilliant comic book writer decides to get “serious”. I have read four of Gary Shteyngart’s previous books and reviewed three. I loved the novels Absurdistan and Super Sad True Love Story and also his memoir Little Failure. I tolerated his latest novel Lake Success. But the man went too far with his latest novel, Our Country Friends.
The story is funny enough at times (though infrequently), and the author’s style is unique. Shteyngart writes as well as anyone in the industry today. The problem seems to be that he decided to become America’s Anton Chekhov and write the Great American novel about the pandemic. There are crude references to the master’s most famous 19th-century plays (Uncle Vanya and The Cherry Orchard), and Shteyngart’s characters seem to have been ripped from the Russian stage. His alter ego, Sasha Senderovsky, a writer, identifies himself as “the landowner.” One of his friends, descended from a Korean chaebol family, is “a gentleman”. And a central character is known to us only as “The Actor.” He is really quite boring.
WAIT FOR THE PANDEMIC, IN ISOLATION
Our Country Friends is set in the upstate New York artists’ colony that Senderovsky built to house his friends. The action is set in 2020. It distantly mirrors the events that caught our attention in that fateful year: the COVID-19 pandemic and the last crazy months of the Trump administration.
Sasha, “the landowner”, lives in the main house of the colony with his wife, Masha Levin-Senderovsky, a psychiatrist and Russian immigrant like himself, and their eight-year-old Korean-American adopted daughter, Natasha (Nat). He invited his two closest friends from high school. Vinod Mehta is a Native American who is a “former associate professor and short-term chef,” and Korean-American computer scientist Karen Cho is the now-rich inventor of a phone dating app that has gone viral. As a group, they are known as “settlers”. They have gathered to await the pandemic in isolation.
Naturally, as the weeks go by until the summer of 2020, these privileged and selfish individuals will engage in one adventure after another. Each of them is cruelly challenged by the actions of the others. Everyone is in awe of the actor, and he turns out (of course) to be the agent of the tragedy that threatens to divide the community. None of this is completely predictable. But of course, everything had to happen. The great American novel about the pandemic is not.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gary Shteyngart was born in 1972 in the Soviet Union in what is now Saint Petersburg. He immigrated to the United States with his parents at the age of seven and grew up in Queens, New York. Shteyngart has a BA in Politics from Oberlin College and an MFA from Hunter College at the City University of New York. He currently teaches writing at Columbia University. In addition to his memoir, he is the author of five novels published up to 2002.
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