The smell of failure, Cathleen Scheyne on Shteyngart and different kinds of failure:

'Shteyngart writes about the details of failure: economic, romantic, filial, and, perhaps most strikingly, physical. He describes urban landscapes as if they are alive, like the “contorted insect of a building, its chimney pumping effluent into the night” in Absurdistan; or breathing sorry music like “the ugly gigantism…of a collection of buildings that, with their rows of balconies on both ends, resembled soot-covered accordions” in Super Sad True Love Story. If his cities are pictured in all their dark, pulpy corporeality, the bodies of his characters are equally sordid, and treated similarly as landscapes swollen or shrunken with meaning.'

Read the review here.

No literature, no story without failure.

It has become our obsession that the failures should have a happy ending, some would say that this is an American obsession. (I was a drug addict, I stole money from elderly ladies and I killed my cat, but now I live in a penthouse, defend human rights and make two million dollars a year, before taxes.)

There are only different shades of failure and the history of mankind can easily be described as: desperate attempts to postpone the really ugly failures, of which death is just a more striking example.