A HOLOGRAM FOR THE KING by Dave Eggers (First published by McSweeney’s, 2012)
Dave Eggers is a person and a writer I admire a lot but I have to say that this is a strange, disjointed and largely disappointing novel.
Set in the present day, it follows the (mis)fortunes of an ageing salesman, Alan Gray, who is in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia heading up a small team of IT consultants. He, and his three younger assistants, work for Reliant “the largest IT supplier in the world”.
They are there to demonstrate, and hopefully sell, some state of the art “telepresence technology” – a virtual hologram mirage that gives the illusion that someone is physically present at a meeting when they are actually elsewhere.
The prestige client is the King of the King Abdullah Economic City (KAEC) a place described as “a city-to-be in a desert by the sea”.
The location is exotic and Alan is intrigued to be in some small way part of the ambitious plan to build a city in the desert – “he wanted to believe that a city rising from dust could happen”.
But waiting for the King proves to be like waiting for Godot, which presumably explains why Eggers’ chose a quote from Samuel Beckett as the novel’s epigraph – “It’s not every day that we are needed”. Continue reading
Not much time for blogging today as I spent a hot and mostly bothered day in Bologna conducting interviews with prospective primary school English teachers in a poorly air-conditioned room. I was practically reduced to a blob
“I dislike new books. It’s like drinking wine that’s not ready. When my first novel was published – Gun, With Occasional Music – I insisted the jacket be made to look like it was old. The gimmick was that it was going to look like a pulp paperback, even though it was a brand new hardcover. I wanted to be a writer like Philip K. Dick or Charles Willeford, or some others I revered who’d been published only in these disreputable, ephemeral ways, and who you could find only in used-book stores. I wanted to be out of print even before I was in print”
I’m a big fan of Dave Eggers; both of his writings and his role as founder of the independent publishing house McSweeney’s. However, I didn’t actually know that he and his wife, Vendela Vida had written the screenplay to Away We Go when I saw the movie. I was drawn to it more through the fact that it was directed by Sam Mendes.
