«America really never failed in a big way – it’s a much younger Country – but it’s failing now: Trump would be our first big failure. Maybe this is just a part of growing up». Considered by New Yorker «one of the best writers under 40», author of books like The Russian debutante’s handbook (2002), Absurdistan (2006), Super sad true love story (2010) and Little Failure: A Memoir (2014) – translated into 28 languages and published in Italy by Guanda –, Gary Shteyngart comments in this way the new course of US administration.
In a world governed by men like Trump and Putin, is there still place for irony?
Sure, now more than ever. We have to make the irony smarter than before. Just today we use very weak irony, very boring irony, comes from the mind to the mouth in three seconds. We can fashioned our irony to be a lot better.
You were born in Russia and moved to United States at the age of seven years. Now Trump and some European countries want to build walls. Do you think that values such as cosmopolitanism and integration are in danger?
They are. I mean this has been the problem for centuries: this contest between can’t appall in cities where you need people from everywhere else to make the best society and then more remote areas where tradition is which it’s most important. For a while, it seems like the more can’t apall in way of living was winning, but it was winning so much that needed a huge reaction: Brexit and Trump are reactions to that. We can’t be very arrogant about it: just because we live in these cities where everything is available, we can’t look down on people who come from places where the only thing that is available is harrowing.
In your opninion, how is crucial manipulation of information by administration of Trump and his men – like Steve Bannon with Breitbart News?
It’s a very Russian technique, disinformation: not just telling people the wrong information but altering the facts so as good as real facts. Population doesn’t now, keeps trading from one source to another: there is not like one or two or three sources you can trust, there is a million sources. Can you tell which one you can trust? How many are made in Macedonia and how many are made in the United States? It’s a perfectly smart campaign to make people completely disoriented about the news.
How can be useful the distance allowed by a dystopian story to describe the reality around us?
Problem with writing books about the present is there is not present left for us, we’re living in the future. So I would say dystopian it’s just a contemporary now.
In your books there are often autobiographical facts. How much is it important the biographical aspect for your writing?
A lot. The first four books have been about small hairy jewish russian man. My next book it’s the first book that’s not gonna have a Russian protagonist, because the last book was a way to clear the desks and to get rid of all that stuff.
Could you tell us about your next work?
Sure. It’s a book set during the summer of 2016. It’s about a couple of falling apart but in the same time that the personal part and public part are joint: election it’s happening, that is influencing everybody. It’s also about trip that one of the characters undertakes by Greyhound bus from New York to San Diego, across the all Country.
«America really never failed in a big way – it’s a much younger Country – but it’s failing now: Trump would be our first big failure. Maybe this is just a part of growing up». Considered by New Yorker «one of the best writers under 40», author of books like The Russian debutante’s handbook (2002), Absurdistan (2006), Super sad true love story (2010) and Little Failure: A Memoir (2014) – translated into 28 languages and published in Italy by Guanda –, Gary Shteyngart comments in this way the new course of US administration.
