Gary Shteyngart’s new memoir, Little Failure, explores the hilarious line between humour and humiliation embodied by the title itself – a pet name given by his mother, ‘failurchka’ or ‘little failure’.
Little Failure presents itself as an examination of identity. Igor Shteyngart, an asthmatic seven year old, arrives in Queens, New York during the late ’70s. A near-sighted Russian boy with little grasp on the English language, he supposedly changes his name to Gary in order to avoid any semblance with ‘Ygor’, the hunchbacked assistant to Frankenstein.
The memoir spans Gary Shteyngart’s years of psychoanalysis, his disillusionment from the Orthodox Jewish roots of his family, and his eventual return to Russia and subsequent immersion in his family’s ancestry.
It is said that standup comics write comedy in order to control the reasons why people laugh at them. As seen through Little Failure, apparently novelists do too.
