Product Description

The story of Octave, one of the new Masters of the Universe; Octave seems to have everything going for him: a good mind, a great job in advertising, a lavish apartment, girls, and a cocaine habit he can afford. But it soon becomes clear that he also has a serious problem with his life. From the moment when he storms out of the offices of a lucrative client after daubing the word 'pigs' all over the walls with his own blood things begin to spiral dangerously out of control. "The top men in advertising? They've already started the third world war" he claims. This belief inevitably spurs him on from violent words to violent deeds, stopping at nothing - not even murder. Beigbeder plays the investigative journalist and the philosopher as much as the novelist, and gives us the confessions of a disillusioned child of the millenium. Half fiction, half diatribe, there's also a great deal of brilliant humour and hilarity in this expose of advertising and universal consumerism. An explosive subject and one of the most caustic authors of his generation make [pound]9.99 a truly unforgettable read.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #441239 in Books
• Published on: 2002-07-05
• Original language: French
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

About the Author
Frederic Beigbeder is a French novelist and well-known literary critic for television, radio and magazine. While writing this novel he was on the staff of an advertising agency (Young and Rubican). When you've read [pound]9.99 you'll know why he isn't any longer.

Customer Reviews

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£9.99 is a fast and harsh attack on global advertising. I read a review in The Independent which suggested it may be the novelistic partner-in-crime to No Logo. Being ex-advertising and anti-globalisation this quite excited me and I waited with itchy eyes for Amazon to deliver; I enjoyed gobbling it down once it arrived. I am chuffed that anti-capitalist novels are, not only being written, but published too. This book was a nice dessert to the non-fiction meals of Beigbeder's political soul sisters-Pilger, Chomsky, Klein et al. The anti-globalisation sentiment seems quite sparse in anything but liberal newspapers' letters' pages at the moment. (It can take a few years gestation for politics to seep out of the arts.)

Beigbeder knows the ad game and his exposé on the ills of consumerism and advertising are gripping and witty (the board meetings are spot-on). The shifting POV in each segment (1st/2nd/3rd person) is clever and works, but why? I think he's over-used it. (In American Psycho we see it for two pages and to far greater impact.) Some lines sparkled like, 'Man is a product with a sell-by date' and, 'I'm the new Robin Hood...I take from the rich and give to the girls', and how the poor sell drugs to buy Nikes, and the rich sell Nikes to buy drugs! Brilliant! The diatribe runs richly thick, but to the detriment of prose; pages feel rushed and poorly considered. The lists of ad hooks, products and labels gets tiresome, American Psycho springs to mind again. Toward the end of £9.99, Beigbeder writes, 'Soon countries will be replaced by companies...Microsoftia...McDonaldland'; profound maybe, but this struck me as too close to the Fight Club line about 'Planet Starbucks...' and for me, lacked the poetics too. So I found the two main problems with £9.99 to be: the prose lacked some much needed consideration; and Palahniuk did this format better already-a new slant is needed.

Female characters were thinly constructed and the men seemed there just to bounce the rhetoric off. The narrator was (purposefully?) unlikeable, aloof and unredeemed. The book is constructed with polemic, dialogue, and polemical dialogue, leaving little room for external environment or interior monlogues-fair enough, but we never fully understand the characters and by the end, can't be too bothered... The story sags from p100 and picks up that many pages later, only to disappoint. This is a plot novel (euphemism for airport novel!) but gets no cigar in that field. Fight Club had a hugely original plot, shone with its subtle attack on consumerism and was raised to modern-classic status by its masterful and original lyricism; £9.99 however, relies too heavily on plot to support what is just a rant ('Advertising is evil, I want out'), uses too many quotations and the voice comes across as incipient (the translation?). Philosophically, Beigbeder is thin on the ground. All we come away with is a list of 'bad things in advertising' but with no real answers. Perhaps he doesn't need to proffer answers and his aim was to smash at globalisation; so why not write a non-fiction? He can't have been that precious about the plot, can he? I had high expectations, others will enjoy it more, but I give it three stars for love of the genre.

My conclusion? Try the French language (99 francs), or buy Fight Club instead.

I spend, therefore I am.
Beigbeder shows us the world in which living equals wanting. Best consumers are people who are frustrated. That is why producers do not want us to be happy and satisfied. They want us to replace the old with the new. As the author humorously remarks, a patent for highly durable stockings has been bought out and burnt, similarly to undestructible washing machines that no one wants to sell. He compares the techniques of advertising to propaganda of the 30s, the difference being that we are told what to look like and what to dream about. The impact of advertising is subtle, but inevitable. Beigbeder challenges our naive belief that we own a free will. Our freedom ends, when we reach out for a product recently seen on TV.
Frederic Beigbeder’s intention is to stir peoples’ minds, and I think he succeeds. He conducts a shock therapy leading to increased awareness of the ways in which we are being manipulated, and also of our power as consumers. He teaches us  to find some distance to all we hear and see. Every minute of our life we are bombarded with millions of slogans, which instil in our societies values and images that do not necessarily bring out our best qualities. And they do not even try to do so – their sole purpose is to sell : Advertising has created a new religion for the masses, who are unaware why and whom they worship. A new kind of perfect global totalitarism has been born.

Easy to be cynical - harder to be right.
Having left the advertising world by choice I thought I'd read a book about someone trying to get out of the advertising world.

What I got was a book that just didn't ring true. The author regurgitates aspects of no logo but twists them so they loose their point. The characters are cartoon like but simply not funny. What should have been shocking was bland. The narrator starts by saying he doesn't want you to like him. This happens but you also don't trust a thing he says, meaning you're not sure if even the fictitious events actual happened to this fictitious character.

Yes there are cynical people in advertising who hate advertising and there are those who beleive the hype they peddle but this book makes little of this.