Product Description

Oceane (conceived on a cross-Channel ferry) doesn't get out much. But then there's a lot you can do in your room. Voyage to the End of the Room is Tibor Fischer on top form - funny, provocative, foul-mouthed, ingenious, thoughtful, touching and completely original. Narrated by a woman who is equally funny, provocative, etc, on the surface it's a novel about a failed dancer turned computer-graphics designer who's been around the block but these days doesn't leave her house. At heart, though, it's a meditation on how and whether you can ever know other people, what is evil, what is reality, what is humanity - and can you fake them? Or is there a litmus test for the real thing? Reality constantly bumps up against virtual reality, as the novel pans around the globe from Brixton to the holiday island of Chuuk by way of Barcelona, the Balkans and the Humber Estuary, introducing a fantastical cast of irresistible characters and their stories - from sad whores and pseudo-travel agents in Lambeth to perfectly formed sexworkers and 'wetwork' specialists in the Club Babylon, a Spanish tower of Babel where our heroine used to work and bizarre deaths kept occurring; and from a scrupulously devious debt collector to mercenaries and other hard men in former Yugoslavia. There's a brilliant twist that jolts the whole novel into perspective, when Oceane starts getting letters from a friend who's been dead for 15 years, and is drawn into a mystery whose answer might, or might not, be found as far away as Micronesia. Voyage to the End of the Room should come with a health warning ('This book could seriously mess with your mind') - and it may very well be addictive.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #170597 in Books
• Published on: 2003-09-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Review
'Side-splittingly funny...Conrad with jokes.', SUNDAY TIMES .'A delicate serio-comic treasure.', Salman Rushdie

FHM
'Barking mad, but brilliant'

From the Publisher
Tibor Fischer at his most inventive, sexy and explosive best - if Michel Houellebecq had a sense of humour this is what he might write-

Customer Reviews

Trivial, Aimless and Pointless
Occasionally entertaining, but really too aimless and frivolous to amount to much more than a series of disconnected - and generally too ridiculous - anecdotes. As you read, you wonder where it is all going; and the answer is ultimately nowhere. This book has an air of having been tossed off (that term used advisedly) to meet a contractual commitment. Fischer should really grasp the concept that to be genuinely funny, humour must be close to the truth. Creating ridiculous stories is easy; making them believable and unifying them into a coherent story is hard, and that is why great writers get paid the big (okay, the small) bucks.

Superficial and aimless
"Voyage to the end of the Room" was, as others have noted below, largely a collection of invented anecdotes that have no cohesion or unifying theme. More importantly, they are not amusing, interesting or plausible anecdotes. It takes more than this to make a novel.

A Witty, Wandering, Loose Poke Around A Wacky Plotline That Just Sucks You In
First things first: not much actually happens in Voyage to the End of the Room. In fact the title suggests just that. It is, succinctly, a great novel for writers who aren't afraid to read something a little different. Once again this novel showcases Fischer's deft hand at writing witty, catching prose which is so ultimately his domain. No one else could possibly have been successful in a novel like this, and none could possibly have made it work either.

However Fischer does seem to get rather bogged down in the flashback to Oceane's experiences working in a sex-club in Barcelona for whatever reasons. I was rather more eager to get onto her tracking Dudley's globtrotting search to uncover whether her ex is actually alive, and if not, why she's receiving letters, the original reason I bought the novel. But then, this is a Tibor Fischer novel, and the whole novel works, but only because of Fischer's ability with his use of language.

Voyage to the End of the Room, like it's protagonist, is odd, but entirely charming. If you hadn't fallen in love with Fischer before, this might just ease you into his style. It's light entertainment which proves to be a little thought-provoking, if only he had stayed a little bit more interested on finding Ocean's ex, rather than her past.