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Loading... Vaihtokurssit (original 1983; edition 1983)by Malcolm Bradbury
Work InformationRates of Exchange by Malcolm Bradbury (1983)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. I found this novel entertaining and enjoyable, given its academic protagonist on an European academic jaunt. Plausible and humorous barely-satirical situations worthy of a quiet afternoon read. ( ) This one is written pleasantly enough, but it has not aged well. In "Rates of Exchange," our hero, a professor who deBy als with less-than-pressing linguistic controversies at a third-rate British university, finds himself somewhat adrift during a two-week visit to an invented but vaguely Balkan Soviet satellite. Adventures with an irresponsible Foreign Office couple, an alluring, vaguely hippie-ish dissident writer, and, inevitably, his official guide, who easily slots herself into the role of a strict-but-fond mother, follow. By the time that this one came out, I can't imagine that most of the satire here hit too hard, and the dissident writer's impassioned paean to creative spontaneity seems a trifle romantic in the second decade in the twenty-first century. One gets the idea that "Rates of Exchange" is supposed to be about one rather bored British man's reawakening after a quiet midlife crisis, but Pettworth, our protagonist, is seldom interesting enough to sustain our interest, even in that context. How he manages to attract the amorous attentions of the Eastern European women he meets is another question without any real answers, though the relationship between him and his guide is left ambiguous enough -- and drawn well enough -- to give us a reason to keep reading. "Rates of Exchange" is good enough for a plane or a beach, but only just. Thank God I read it in quarantine.
His last novel, ''The History Man'' (1975), was celebrated in England as an indictment of the excesses of the academic revolution of the 1960's. Its celebrity grew after it was adapted into a popular television serial. ''Rates of Exchange,'' which was a finalist in the prestigious Booker Prize competition in Britain this year, is a very different sort of book. Suddenly, here the professor of English is the theorist. This densely written book, in which dialogue appears on the page in unparagraphed chunks, is a novel about an idea. It is an astonishing tour de force. Mr. Bradbury has invented an entire country, essentially mythic although Eastern European in origin, to sustain a proposition laid out before us in various forms in the course of the book.... While ''Rates of Exchange'' may not be an altogether successful work, it is nevertheless one of the most exciting, original and worthwhile novels to appear in Britain recently.
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize: In this comedic novel, an English professor collides with disaster at the peak of the Cold War Shortly after his plane first grazes the tarmac in the eastern European nation of Slaka, Dr. Angus Petworth is beset by a cavalcade of misadventures. A university lecturer and seasoned international traveler, Petworth is nevertheless unprepared for the oddities of culture and circumstance that await him on the other side of the iron curtain. In two eventful weeks, Petworth gives an incendiary interview, is seduced by a femme fatale, and becomes embroiled in a plot of international intrigue, all of which conspire to give the mild, unassuming professor way more than he bargained for. Satirizing everything from critics and diplomats to Marxism and academia, Malcolm Bradbury's Rates of Exchange is a witty and lighthearted novel of cultural interchange at the height of the Cold War. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)823.914Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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