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You Shall Know Our Velocity is a compelling and thought-provoking novel by award-winning Dave Eggers Will and Hand are burdened by $38,000 and the memory of their friend Jack. Taking a week out of their lives, they decide to travel around the world to give the money away. They can't really say why they're doing it, just that it needs to be done. Perhaps it's something to do with Jack's death - perhaps they'll find the reason later. But as their plans are frustrated, twisted and altered at every step and the natives prove far from grateful to their benefactors, Will and Hand find that the world is an infinitely bigger, more surreal and exhilarating place than they ever realised. In fact, it's somewhere to get lost in . . . 'Dave Eggers has become J. D. Salinger, Ken Kesey and Jack Kerouac rolled into one' The Times 'Endearing, funny . . . the prose is high on energy and Eggers' talents make it worth the trip' Guardian… (more)
Will, burdened with a large inheritance, sets off round the world with his friend Hand with the aim of giving it away. Aside from the rather odd plot, the relationship between the two friends and their absurd activities make it a good read. ( )
This book is mindblowingly brilliant. It manages to go beyond being a book and brings the story into the real world, almost as a piece of performance art. I can't say more about that without giving any spoilers, but I will say the best way to read it is to read the first edition, wait until you would go back to reread as with any other book, but read the second edition instead.
Regardless of which you read, the episodes are touching, funny and horrifying by turns. The characters are wonderfully rendered and the structure (travel accounts alternating with flashback sequences) will never leave you bored.
I really enjoyed this book. It was a bit "Catcher in the Rye goes on Holiday" and now that I've seen Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited 3 or 4 years later, I'd say they are similar in tone. ( )
Very cool travel story meets Brewster's Millions. I love the concept of the journey, the friendship between the main characters, and the layout of the book. Leave it to Dave Eggers to redefine how to publish a book. ( )
I was talking to Hand, one of my two best friends, the one still alive, and we were planning to leave.
Quotations
Anyway, I read news and look for and collect facts because so far they haven't added up anything. I had pictured, as a younger man, that the things I knew and would know were bricks in something that would, effortlessly, eventually, shape itself into something recognizable, meaningful. A massive and spiritual sort of geometry - a ziggurat, a pyramid. But here I am now, so many years on, and if there is a shape to all this, it hasn't revealed itself. But no, thus far the things I know grow out, not up, and what might connect all these things, connective tissues or synapses, or just some sense of order, doesn't exist, or isn't functioning, and what I knew at twenty-seven can't be found now.
To travel is selfish -- that money could be used for hungry stomachs and you're using it for your hungry eyes, and the needs of the former must trump the latter, right? And are there individual needs? How much disbelief, collectively, must be suspended, to allow for tourism?"
Her English was seamless. Everyone’s was. I had sixty words of Spanish and Hand had maybe twice that in French, and that was it. How had this happened? Everyone in the world knew more than us, about everything, and this I hated then found hugely comforting.
So I have advice for you guys. I don't want you to actually use it. I just want you to hear it, have it, sometime after the fact--after it's useful. Don't listen to me. Advice so rarely finds its intended audience. It's like the sword in the stone--you leave it there, maybe someday someone finds it useful. Sorry, people--we're driving through Latvia and I can't vouch for my state of mind. 1. Thoughts are made of water and water always finds a way. 2. If you can't dodge the water, run. 3. There are bears and there are small dogs. Be strong like a bear! If they take out your teeth, sit on the dogs. Bears always forget they can just sit on the dogs. Sit on the dogs! 4. If your house is haunted bring in your friends and start tearing the walls down. How can they haunt a house that you take apart? Aha!
Last words
I stopped for a minute I swear, but then the sound and pictures came back on and for two more glorious and interminable months we lived.
Don't confuse this work with the revised and expanded version entitled "Sacrament" which was issued by Vintage with the title "You Shall Know Our Velocity!" - Note the added explanation point at the end.
Publisher's editors
Blurbers
Original language
Information from the Dutch Common Knowledge. Edit to localize it to your language.
You Shall Know Our Velocity is a compelling and thought-provoking novel by award-winning Dave Eggers Will and Hand are burdened by $38,000 and the memory of their friend Jack. Taking a week out of their lives, they decide to travel around the world to give the money away. They can't really say why they're doing it, just that it needs to be done. Perhaps it's something to do with Jack's death - perhaps they'll find the reason later. But as their plans are frustrated, twisted and altered at every step and the natives prove far from grateful to their benefactors, Will and Hand find that the world is an infinitely bigger, more surreal and exhilarating place than they ever realised. In fact, it's somewhere to get lost in . . . 'Dave Eggers has become J. D. Salinger, Ken Kesey and Jack Kerouac rolled into one' The Times 'Endearing, funny . . . the prose is high on energy and Eggers' talents make it worth the trip' Guardian
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