Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.
|
Loading... A Hologram for the King (edition 2012)by Dave Eggers (Author)
Work InformationA Hologram for the King by Dave Eggers
   No current Talk conversations about this book.  MXMLLN | Jan 12, 2024 |    ) aleshh | Jan 12, 2024 |  ) DKnight0918 | Dec 23, 2023 |  ) Bonnie_Bailey | Jun 30, 2023 | But once there, Alan and his young team of tech whizz kids (capable of conjuring up a hologram of one of their London based colleagues) find themselves in a huge circus tent, with hardly any internet and no-one to attend to them in a city consisting of a collection of empty buildings of marble and stones. The vacuousness extends for weeks. The king can come any moment. Alan interacts with a Danish consultant lady, who takes him to some drunken orgies. But Alan can’t get it up anymore. He keeps on trying to write to his daughter in drunken stupors. The only thing going for him is his relationship with a local driver in a clapped-out car. Alan tells him jokes, to great acclaim. Meanwhile we get a perfect description of the kind of collapse of Industrial America, where all jobs and manufacturing has been outsourced to Asia, over time. The back cloth to Trump’s rise. At some stage Alan joins his driver to the latter’s ancestral home in the desert, and goes on a hunting party at night, where he almost shoots a young herdsboy (mistaking him for a wolf). Next Alan receives surgery on a lymphoma in his neck, and then engages with the Saudi female surgeon. The end is swift and devastating – the king visits, the hologram show works perfectly, but the King ignores Alan, proceeds to the next door building, is seen leaving shaking hands of Chinese businessman, and then it turns out that Alan’s consortium has won no contract. Alan decides to hang on to see whether it is nevertheless possible to gain some next contract. End. Wow, this is so vacuous. It confirms all my prejudice against Saudi Arabia as a place of no interest whats-o-ever. And Eggers paints a shrill picture of the globalized world – devoid of values or feelings, whereby modern-day (migrant) slaves do the work and the elite enjoys a completely morally decrepit life. And America does not matter anymore. (  ) alexbolding | May 13, 2023 |
 The saving grace is that Eggers' subject is so timely and important, and the way he dramatises it so apt and amusing. [...] Eggers is good at conveying the hallucinatory, weightless feeling of expatriate life in the Gulf states: the featureless hotels that "could have been in Arizona, in Orlando, anywhere"; the wild parties in closed-off diplomatic compounds; the huge structures thrown up by oil wealth in the middle of nowhere. A diverting, well-written novel about a middle-aged American dreamer, joined to a critique of how the American dream has been subverted by outsourcing our know-how and manufacturing to third-world nations. That last is certainly a distinctly contemporary touch. However, as for Alan himself: We’ve seen him and his brothers before, in William Dean Howells’s “The Rise of Silas Lapham,” in Theodore Dreiser’s “The Financier” and Sinclair Lewis’s “Babbitt,” in Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” and John Updike’s Rabbit novels. In literature, if not in life, middle-aged businessmen seldom find happiness.  Dave Eggers hat einen ebenso vergnüglichen wie gescheiten Roman über den Aberwitz der Globalisierung geschrieben. In the New York Times Book Review, Pico Iyer called the novel “[a] supremely readable parable of America in the global economy that is haunting, beautifully shaped and sad ... With ferocious energy and versatility, [Eggers] has been studying how the world is remaking America ... Eggers has developed an exceptional gift for opening up the lives of others so as to offer the story of globalism as it develops and, simultaneously, to unfold a much more archetypal tale of struggle and loneliness and drift.” Has the adaptationHas as a student's study guideAwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
Fiction.
Literature.
HTML: In a rising Saudi Arabian city, far from weary, recession-scarred America, a struggling businessman named Alan Clay pursues a last-ditch attempt to stave off foreclosure, pay his daughter's college tuition, and finally do something great. In A Hologram for the King, Dave Eggers takes us around the world to show how one man fights to hold himself and his splintering family together. .No library descriptions found. |
Current DiscussionsNonePopular covers
 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.36)
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Wikipedia in English (1)
20
Themes:
Going to the tent everyday
Tumor
Suicide neighbor
Insomnia
Colleagues
Ex wife
Father
Yousef
Doctor
King (