The Dead are Wondering Why They're Still Here
Summary from Goodreads
A profound and dazzlingly entertaining novel from the writer Louis Menand calls "Jane Austen with a Russian soul" In her warm, absorbing and keenly observed new novel, Lara Vapnyar follows the intertwined lives of four immigrants in New York City as they grapple with love and tumult, the challenges of a new home, and the absurdities of the digital age. Vica, Vadik, Sergey and Regina met in Russia in their school days, but remained in touch and now have very different American lives. Sergey cycles through jobs as an analyst, hoping his idea for an app will finally bring him success. His wife Vica, a medical technician struggling to keep her family afloat, hungers for a better life. Sergey’s former girlfriend Regina, once a famous translator is married to a wealthy startup owner, spends her days at home grieving over a recent loss. Sergey’s best friend Vadik, a programmer ever in search of perfection, keeps trying on different women and different neighborhoods, all while pining for the one who got away. As Sergey develops his app—calling it "Virtual Grave," a program to preserve a person's online presence after death—a formidable debate begins in the group, spurring questions about the changing perception of death in the modern world and the future of our virtual selves. How do our online personas define us in our daily lives, and what will they say about us when we're gone?
My Thoughts:
Still Here by Lara Vapnar was not at all what I expected when I was given this book. It seemed to be an interesting concept when I read the summary, people's online presence being preserved once they die in this new app that Sergey is inventing. When I received the book, I was hoping for it to catch my attention right away and thought this would be a very interesting idea. I got none of this from reading this book. In fact, I couldn't even be bothered to finish reading it because it seemed to be meaningless to me. There was nothing to this book but boredom.
Entertaining novel? Where? Because halfway through the book, I still didn't find it to be entertaining or catching my interest. Vapnar immediately throws numerous characters at you in the first chapter. The introduction of each is so brief, it's hard to keep up with who is who. And the names similar to one another? A little variety would be better in order to keep track of which character was married to who. I found myself having to keep going back to see who was who, an annoying factor when you're trying to read the book and enjoy it.
This book seemed to be more about the lives of the four Russian immigrants than that of the app we were believed this book was to be about. Vapnar had a good idea with the app idea, but where was it in this book? Mentioned a few times in the first couple of chapters? That wasn't enough to hold my interest. The characters weren't even that interesting to begin with, why would I want to continue reading about their lives and how shallow they were?
I rated this book 1 our of 5 stars because I couldn't even bare to get through it. Had it been interesting from the beginning and kept with the idea we were believed it to be about, this would've been a great book. Vapnar disappointed me in this. If I wanted to read a book about four different people, I would choose a book that was about just that. I was looking for a paranormal type of book with a story-line. I didn't get that with Still Here.
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