Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #662384 in Books
• Published on: 2004-10-31
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

Customer Reviews

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Marek van der Jagt is in the beginning of his twenties and grows up in a completely deranged family in Vienna. His mother has failed as an opera singer but still behaves like a star and has whole contingents of lovers, his father sells life insurances and refuses to talk about any subject that is important to maintain a normal family life. One of his brothers is a conductor, the other a famous ecomomist. Only Marek (who has not yet finished his philosophy study and probably never will and who gives extra lessons to dim children) does not succeed in life. The fact that his private parts are the size of a toe (or "three quarters of a pinkie" as he tells one his lady friends) does not help his self-confidence either. But all in all he is fairly successful with the women.

A comical and smoothly written story by the alter ego of the Dutch writer Arnon Grunberg in which a whole array of strange characters passes by. Nice to read.

"If life is a joke, I wanted to resign."
Marek van der Jagt is a pen name for iconoclastic Dutch novelist Arnon Grunberg, whose novel Blue Mondays won the Netherlands' 1994 Anton Wachter Prize for a Debut Novel. After publishing additional successful novels, Grunberg invented a pen name, "Marek van der Jagt" and used that name to write this book, unexpectedly winning the 2000 prize for Best First Novel (again) and leading to the discovery of van der Jagt's true identity.

Young, irreverent, and gifted with the ability to see real life as the joke it sometimes is, Marek van der Jagt/Arnon Grunberg writes earthy, beautifully observed prose, breathing life into every aspect of this hilarious and ribald coming-of-age story. The "author" is a fourteen-year-old philosophy student as the novel opens, deciding he will devote his life to "l'amour fou," or mad, passionate love. The son of a Viennese insurance salesman and a woman for whom unrestrained "l'amour fou" is life's primary occupation, Marek has little family guidance about the facts of life, but he eventually finds two tourists, Milena and Andrea, to teach him.

Marek's farcical reactions to "l'amour fou," his inappropriate comments, his clumsy approaches, and his undisguised fascination with his older brother's prowess make Marek's first attempt at seduction one of the least romantic (and most amusing) seductions ever recorded. For Marek, however, this is an ironically life-changing experience: Milena's pointed comments about his naked body cause him to seriously question whether he might really be a dwarf, one who is a little taller than usual. The remainder of the novel deals with Marek's attempts to cope with his feelings of inferiority as he becomes an adult.

Throughout his farcical search for l'amour fou, Marek makes grand pronouncements and "profound" comments about life and love, often relating his experiences to those of philosophers and creating satiric epigrams ("If you drink enough vodka, you understand everything."). When he is making love, he thinks of Camus, ponders the French Surrealists, fantasizes about being "the Rimbaud of Vienna," and dreams of being a successful poet with a volume entitled The Dwarf and Other Poems. His comic observations about the human foibles of his larger-than-life family and friends show them to be ludicrous, while his own naïve, Don Quixote-like search for "l'amour fou" is both touching and laugh-out-loud funny. Ironic, satiric, and ultimately thoughtful, the novel teaches that one "should not live as if a masterpiece is on its way." Mary Whipple