Customer Reviews

My Life at First Try: A Novel

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In the sea of books, it's too easy to overlook the yet unknown author (I

am sure he won't remain unknown for long). I am so glad that I risked

my hard-yearned pennies to buy "My Life at First Try." I found that this

book is truly a marriage of exquisite language and a racing plot. It's

like a great dinner for everyone: pizza for the kids, truffles for the

high-brow, salad for the vegetarians and a raw steak for down-to-earth

guests.

"I have found Mark Budman's book, "My Life at First Try," to be an engaging and unique glimpse into the experiences of a Russian immigrant confronted with the challenges of American society. Mr. Budman has a finely-tuned sense of humor which reflects his perspective on life and his good-natured adjustments to the often bewildering and sometimes humorous situations he encounters in America. He shows us America as seen through the eyes of a new citizen.

I was impressed with the structure of the novel; Mark begins with a fascinating glimpse into life in the Soviet Union, and the factors which inspired him to bring his family to America--disgust with the restrictions of communism, and the correspondence he received from relatives in America, urging him to join them.

Mark has arranged his chapters in ten-year segments, so we can see how he gradually matured and adjusted to life in the U.S.A. Writing under the guise of fiction, he makes this adjustment seem much easier than it must actually have been.

I enjoyed reading "My Life at First Try" for several reasons, chief among them were the insights Mark gives us into the trials and tribulations of a new immigrant. His sense of humor shines through in nearly every page.

I am happy to recommend Mark's book to everyone who has ever wondered what it would be like to leave his or her native land and learn to cope with a different language and customs. Mark's book is a thinly-disguised non-fiction book with which gives us a glimpse into the heart of an immigrant, his aspirations, his moments of joy, and his struggles to find a place in a new world. As a reader, I enjoyed taking this journey in the company of a brilliant boy who grew up to be a brilliant and gracious man.

His "First Try" was a great success! .

The fanciful protagonist in this novel-in-short-short-stories begins telling his life in succinct vignettes as a small child, a tiny Russian exile in Siberia. A dreamer even then, he fancies himself by turns a reindeer driver, a slayers of dragons, a party boss, a lover, and, at length, a Marco Polo destined for travel to that strangest of strange lands, America, where he will unite with his heart's true mate, his American cousin.

Like most dreamers, Alex discovers that those fancies that come true, do so in a skewed and puzzling manner. "My Life at First Try" is filled with hang-dog humor and wry pathos, as Alex dutifully plods through school, college, clumsy sex, more graceful love, a stint at a fume-choked chemical plant, marriage, the military, and, at last, emigration to the US with his family to ultimately take a job in the high-tech industry. When at last he discovers his true calling--to be a writer--he finds that, to write of his Russian self, he must overcome his Russian grammar and embrace the bizarre and impertinent language of his new home.

I've worked with Mark Budman for years as an editor for his literary magazine, Vestal Review. I have marveled at his mastery of the very short story, Flash Fiction; he renders the form with a delightfully alien eye, and the reader is the richer for the new angle he reveals. In "My Life at First Try," Budman turns that eye on his own life--sort of--and the result is thoroughly refreshing and, yes, very funny.

For anybody who's ever been a stranger in a strange land--or has ever known one--this book is a particularly sweet treat. It's well and uniquely written, charming and satirical, lovely and affecting.

Susan O'Neill, author, Don't Mean Nothing: Short Stories of Vietnam

My Life At First Try is an intimate read, successful in grounding the reader in Alex's world as he comes of age, and then comes into middle age, and, finally, arrives at late middle age. The story moves at a clip due to the short chapters (it is a novel-in-flashes, meaning most of the chapters are under 1000 words), and yet one gets the feeling that each word, phrase, sentence is falling carefully from the narrator's tongue. There is no fluff in this book, just heartfelt experience rendered in a beautiful, economic prose. What I especially loved were the truths inherent in the narrator's responses to life, whether he's facing communist bureacracy, American work ethics, family politics or the travails of his own heart. I would recommend this book to anyone.

The designated genre is "Novel". But the title suggest a memoir or biography. Each chapter begins with a date stamp parallel with the author's life. Events are linked by recurrent themes such as Alex's fond attraction to his American cousin Annie or his dreadful paranoia over life in post Stalinist Soviet Union. Is this memoir or something else?

Alex writes in the first person. It is obvious that Alex is a fictional character through which the author conveys his own life story. So what we have here is real memory treated as fiction.

There are some simple reasons why books are written this way. First biography is too constraining, and without some celebrity status, biography attracts few readers. Another, fiction opens the floodgates of imagination. It exaggerates, omits, and indulges. The novelist is free to pull together by hook or crook the loose strands of his plot. Almost impossible to do in biography.

All that aside, I was impressed by Budman's metaphoric poetry. Here is an example from his description of a wild ride on a motor cycle.

"I feel on the higher level of consciousness like a French Aristocrat about to be guillotined, and on the lower, down-to-earth level, like fish about to be gutted."

The dichotomy reminds me of those subtle levels of awareness found in the Kabbalah. Simultaneous peaks and valleys. Moments where we explore life's complex emotions on our "first try" at living. He refers to the chapters as his "songs". Some work better than others. Overall the book moves nimbly and is a pleasure to re-read because of this poetry.

The first half of My Life at First Try is set in the Soviet Union during the cold war. It has many of the things you might expect of such a novel: bread lines, government spies and snitches, and well-educated people consigned to miserable jobs in unsafe chemical plants. There's a lot of cold and snow, of course, and a lot of people drunk on vodka. This may sound like the setting for a bleak novel, but My Life at First Try is a very rousing, funny book.

It is not the events or the surroundings that are funny so much as how they are perceived by Alex, the central character. He has an extraordinarily fertile and creative mind that sees wonder in everything as a child, and wry humor in everything as an adult. For the most part, this humorous storytelling takes place inside his own head, but whenever he speaks his mind, the people around him are either baffled or amused. He is blessed or doomed to always be seen as a comedian to friends and a troublemaker to authorities.

This slightly off-kilter view of things makes for a very unusual story about growing up in the Soviet Union, coming to America, and becoming a solid member of the upper middle-class. I have never read anything quite like it.

Budman tells his story in short chapters. The result is that the book has a very rapid, at times exhilarating pace. At one point when Alex is in his forties, I remember thinking, wow, the poor guy is going to have to face old age soon, and I can remember when he was a teenager not all that long ago. In the end I felt somewhat amazed at just how much happened and how quickly it all passed, just like real life.

a startlingly beautiful novel that is part postmodern novel in flash-bites, part fairy-tale, and part bukowski-esque romp through the Soviet Union. Communist Russia emerges as an alien, fantasmatic space, and Budman's sympathetic, but often unheroic, always wry protagonist-narrator does not allow for easy conclusions or answers. captivating, funny, and ruthless, a delightful reading experience that is at the same time profound, troubling, and moving.

My life at first try is a wonderful book, very well written in a unique and irresistible style. In Budman's semi-autobiographical novel he tells the life story of Alex. Every chapter contains a little story as if he shows us a photo-album with snapshots of his life. The book starts with Alex as a four year old Russian boy, in the last chapter Alex celebrates Thanksgiving with his family as a fifty-six year old American from Russian descent.

The first part of the book has a vivid atmosphere, and even if you've never been in Russia you can feel it as if you are there: clear pictures of the environment and the people, both serious and funny, sometimes hilarious. The second part, in the United States, is more subtle and has many touching moments.

Mark Budman is a true narrator and chooses his word with care. This book is one of the best I read this year. I hope he will write at least a dozen more.

A poignant semi-autobiographical story of an immigrant -- stark, funny and beautiful. I read this book in one sitting, anxious to see what happened, and was continually astounded by Budman's unique prose.

Length:: 2:22 Mins

My Life at First Try: A Novel