A Stranger in the Earth
By:
Sign Up Now!
Already a Member? Log In
You must be logged into Bookshare to access this title.
Learn about membership options,
or view our freely available titles.
- Synopsis
- Ah, the fish-out-of-water tale. In A Stranger in the Earth, debut novelist Marcel The roux drops fresh-out-of-the-sticks Horace Little fair into a rough-and-tumble London populated by all manner of dreamers, conspirators, and fakes. Once he's settled and gainfully employed, the eye-opening that Horace experiences constitutes the novel's comic arc. And his job at his uncle's newspaper, The South London Bugle, is a great narrative device, setting up a series of humorous encounters with monomaniacs (and just plain maniacs) of various stripes. There's Trevor Diamond, the animal-rights activist devoted to the preservation of the urban fox. There's Horace's Scrabble-obsessed landlord, Mr. Narayan, who wins his games using words like re woo. In these and an abundance of other secondary characters, The roux's craft shines. You can't sum up their relationships in single sentences without sounding like you're setting up a punch line: What do you get when you cross a politician with a lady of the evening? What does an animal-rights activist have to do with a gardening columnist? To The roux's credit, the answer to both of these questions is: Quite a lot, actually. What's lost in the shuffle of who-did-what-to-whom is Horace himself, who comes off more as a surrogate reader than a fully realized character. While those called up from central casting steal the show, he remains somewhat muted, more often a witness than a participant in the madness. His moments of self-reflection appropriately encounter this kind of sentiment: And for all his conscientious interest in the world, and the business of getting up and going to work each day, he was still aware of a hollowness inside him that he couldn't fill up with newsprint.
- Copyright:
- 1998
Book Details
- Book Quality:
- Excellent
- Book Size:
- 258 Pages
- ISBN-13:
- 9780151004089
- Publisher:
- N/A
- Date of Addition:
- 01/09/02
- Copyrighted By:
- C Marcel the Roux
- Adult content:
- No
- Language:
- English
- Has Image Descriptions:
- No
- Categories:
- Literature and Fiction
- Submitted By:
- Bookshare.org Volunteer
- Proofread By:
- Snehali (Holly) Marimuthu
- Usage Restrictions:
- This is a copyrighted book.