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By *obletonMan
over a year ago
A Home Among The Woodland Creatures |
The Thought Gang by Tibor Fischer.
because is bonkers, hilarious, sexy, and has a word beginning with the letter Z on every page.
I highly recommend it.
this guy does too:
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I was recommended Tibor Fischer’s ‘The Thought Gang’ by the representative of a publisher who was still miffed that a rival company had bought the rights to publish this book. He rated this as the funniest book he’d ever read and ‘definitely better than anything I’m trying to sell you.’ When the equivalent of a car salesman says ‘don’t buy from me, try him’, you know something special is going on.
The trouble with books that are hyped so extravagantly is that they tend to disappoint. In five subsequent re-readings since 1998, Eddie Coffin and Hubert have never failed to get a chuckle. But the point is… this novel isn’t written as a comedy. Hubert is dying, Eddie knows he’s d*unk himself out of a liver. Both men are failures and this story is about how we have to try to learn to live with the disappointment of finding that we are not who we first promised to be. No, that’s getting to what the book is about either…
If I described this book as Keystone Kops meets A Year in Provence but with better writing, you might have an idea of where this book is coming from. At the time of publication, Nick Hornby wrote: “The Thought Gang is The Lavender Hill Mob rescripted by Georges Perec and Will Self, and yet Fischer somehow emerges from it all with credit.” Hornby, it should be said, wears his jealousy poorly.
This novel is essentially the interior monologue of a fifty-something, overweight, bald philosophy lecturer who is too clever for his own good and too lazy to care. He absconds from England with his departments funds and promptly loses them when the hire care he is driving comes off the road. In the cheap hotel he retreats to, he is mugged by a one-armed, one-legged ex-con just released from prison. The next morning, with no funds for a breakfast but a pistol, Eddie Coffin – our soon-to-be former philosophy lecturer and specialist in the Ionian philosophers (there’s a sly joke in there for those readers who’ve studied philosophy) – goes to a bank and makes a withdrawal. Hubert, the French ex-con, is inspired and together, they create The Thought Gang."
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