In parts it is indeed a parody of our increasingly techno-fascist modern day culture, but deep down it is a novel of love and family: the two things that our gadgets will never be able to replace. Shteyngart recognizes the terrible weight that the dissolution of social norms bears upon both individuals and the group at large, and explores how easy it is to concentrate power (and, naturally, abuse it) when the fate of the world is claimed to be at stake. In the world of Lenny Abramov, whose diary entries form the bulk of the novel’s narrative, the apocalypse has already occurred in the way that Jean Baudrillard proclaims it has. “A life that ends in death is a life devoid of meaning,” writes our protagonist: the ever-changing world as it is has been ceded, and the only refuge lies in a longed-for eternity.
Sometimes, perhaps depending on the quality of light, or my glucose levels, or if not that than some other abstract condition, I cannot help but see my city as having lived through the end of time. Yet at other points, I feel full to the bursting with a joie de vivre and hope for a future that repairs the Earth and consoles the battered consciences of its inhabitants. Sometimes, though, I feel in a most odd way both of these conflicting outlooks at once: call it the annulment; the anti-apocalypse. Like Shteyngart so gracefully proclaims, life is not about retaliation, the settling of scores with the other in the paranoid modality endemic to apocalyptic thought and exemplified in Glorious Appearing. Perhaps it is rather about acknowledging the end as it constantly flows around us, and – if we might be so lucky – finding others to hold on to as we batten down the hatches and bear this flood.
