Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart

1313 Words3 Pages

Imagine a time where every detail about your life (credit score, personality ranking, “hotness” ranking, etc.) was available to anybody around you through something similar to the present-day iPhone. Now imagine this world being reality. In Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story, this idea is reality. Everybody in the world has an äppäräti, and everybody knows everything about one another. But is knowing everything about your friends and neighbors really a good thing, especially when the world around you is crumbling because of this knowledge? Perhaps it isn’t. As Bertrand Russell, a British philosopher, once said, “In all affairs, love, religion, politics, or business, it’s a healthy idea, now and then, to hang a question mark on things you have long taken for granted.” The relationship between Lenny Abramov and Eunice Park, the main characters of Super Sad True Love Story, could have used a question mark on how culture, media, business, and technology impacted their personal relationships throughout the book.
Cultural differences in the United States have always impacted personal relationships, sometimes for the good, but also for the bad. Lenny and Eunice’s cultural variances were no different. Lenny Abramov was a 39-year-old man who worked in Indefinite Life Extension at Post-Human Services, which allowed the wealthy and the healthy—known as High Net Worth Individuals—to become immoral. Lenny is a self-deprecating Russian-American Jewish male, who is self-conscious about his appearance, uselessly well educated, passionate, neither old nor young, and helplessly prone to error. Eunice Park, on the other hand, is a 24-year-old young Korean-American woman who is constantly struggling with materialism and the pressures of her ...

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...conservative ways of communicating in order to stay in touch with her family and friends while she was away from them.
In the end, culture, media, business, and technology impacted the personal relationship thoughout Super Sad True Love Story for the worse. Lenny and Eunice ended things; Eunice left Lenny for Joshie. Noah and Amy were killed in an explosion on a ferryboat during “The Rupture.” Joshie’s Indefinite Life Extension took a turn for the worse. His body could not withstand immortality, and he began to whither away just like the Low Net Worth Individuals. Lenny left the United States and never married anybody. His heart was truly broken by Eunice leaving him for what seemed to be a newer model. All in all, everybody got what they deserved and the world continued on with the advancements in technology, although books did make a comeback in the near future.

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