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Loading... The Pickle Index: A Novelby Eli Horowitz
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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 book at a library sale and bought it because of the name and artwork. It turned out to be an incredible hidden gem. The dystopian government forces the citizens to send vegetable recipes and has elaborate Rube Goldberg public executions. Very funny and unique book. ( ) The way this book is presented is great, you get 2 nicely bound hardback books and alternate chapters from each. They also have pictures that kind of fit together at the start of each corresponding chapter. So the form is fun if a little inconvenient to carry around! There's very little explanation of what is going on, so it is a bit bewildering as you swap between tales from a pretty scrappy sounding circus troupe and reports from a not-quite-objective journalist. In the end it's more successful as an experiment than a story but I'm OK with that. This was such a strange story, and I'm still not sure I entirely understood what was going on, but it was full of whimsy. I love Flora, the narrator of the circus, and the rest of the circus characters were hilarious. I wish there had been a little more world building - I felt totally lost the entire time. A first time for me reading author Eli Horowitz, I was quite taken by his trim little satire, the intriguingly titled The Pickle Index. It's a scathing look at the control exerted over citizens by a nanny state, but also a tale of ordinary people with oddball skills who just want to live their lives creating something big. In this case, the something big is a circus. A somewhat derelict and not quite successful circus, but, and here lies the poignancy, their own effort at life. A mixed bag of characters and a very strange old dog led by one Zloty Kornblatt, clown, make up the circus. An unctuous reporter named Hank Hamper represents the state through his byline in the newspaper: The Srutinizer. Pretty soon it becomes obvious that this Hank actually has a crush on the supreme leader of the state, an enigmatic presence known only as Madame J. Hilariously, the Madame has a "Javanese cobalt octopus" named Simeon as a pet. (I couldn't help being reminded of a certain South Indian leader whose followers practiced the same rank sycophancy. She didn't have any interesting pets, though.) Full review here: http://devikamenon.blogspot.com/2016/06/readings-pickle-index.html no reviews | add a review
"A pithy parable of pickles, power, and personal pride-and a publication complete with app, 3-D printing, and more Zloty Kornblatt is the hapless ringmaster of an even more hapless circus troupe. But one fateful night, Zloty makes a mistake: he accidentally makes his audience laugh. Here on the outskirts of Burford-where the population subsists on a diet and a whole economy keyed primarily to pickles-laughter is a rare occasion. It draws the immediate attention of the local bureaucracy, and by morning Zloty has been branded an "instigator, conspirator, and fomenter" and is detained. When the circus troupe awakes, they gloomily assume that their leader has abandoned them in the night. But when a local functionary spills the truth about Zloty's fate, the performers rouse themselves to spring their leader from his cell, their arcane talents (an escape artist who can fold his body into compact shapes, a strongman with an affinity for miming, an old dog with the ferocious heart of a lion.) suddenly strangely useful. Unlikely success follows unlikely success until, suddenly, it doesn't. and it's left to Flora Bialy, Zloty's understudy and our shy narrator, to save the day. The Pickle Index is a delightful and charming fable of a novel-but it is also an exhilarating, innovative storytelling experience by an author who, as the cocreator of The Silent History and The New World, has long been pushing the edges of literary fiction. The Pickle Index is his most dazzling, holistic achievement yet"--
"A pithy parable of prison breaks, performance anxiety, and pickled vegetables -- and a publication complete with app, 3D printing, and more"-- No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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