A Fraction Of The Whole
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Meet the Deans.
Heroes or Criminals? Crackpots or Visionaries? Relatives or Enemies?
It's a simple family story. . .
The fact is, the whole of Australia despises my father more than any other man, just as they adore my uncle more than any other man. I might as well set the story straight about both of them.'
From his prison cell, Jasper Dean tells the unlikely story of his scheming father Martin, his crazy Uncle Terry and how the three of them upset - mostly unintentionally - an entire continent. Incorporating death, parenting (good and bad kinds), one labyrinth, first love, a handbook for criminals, a scheme to make everyone rich and an explosive suggestion box, Steve Toltz's A Fraction of the Whole is a hilarious, heartbreaking story of families and how to survive them.
'Riotously funny. . . deserves a place next to A Confederacy of Dunces.' Wall Street Journal
'A rich father-and-son story packed with incident, humour and characters reminiscent in styles of Charles Dickens and John Irving. . . A Fraction of the Whole soars like a rocket.' LA Times
'A grand achievement and the debut of a great comic talent. But it also has a heart. . . go away and read it.' Sunday Times
'Toltz brings all the energy and assurance of a young Peter Carey to this burlesque, bravura performance.' Irish Times
'A gloriously absorbing, preposterous and funny excursion to the brink of madness and the meaning of life.' Sunday Telegraph
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
At the heart of this sprawling, dizzying debut from a quirky, assured Australian writer are two men: Jasper Dean, a judgmental but forgiving son, and Martin, his brilliant but dysfunctional father. Jasper, in an Australian prison in his early 20s, scribbles out the story of their picaresque adventures, noting cryptically early on that "y father's body will never be found." As he tells it, Jasper has been uneasily bonded to his father through thick and thin, which includes Martin's stint managing a squalid strip club during Jasper's adolescence; an Australian outback home literally hidden within impenetrable mazes; Martin's ill-fated scheme to make every Australian a millionaire; and a feverish odyssey through Thailand's menacing jungles. Toltz's exuberant, looping narrative thick with his characters' outsized longings and with their crazy arguments sometimes blows past plot entirely, but comic drive and Toltz's far-out imagination carry the epic story, which puts the two (and Martin's own nemesis, his outlaw brother, Terry) on an irreverent roller-coaster ride from obscurity to infamy. Comparisons to Special Topics in Calamity Physics are likely, but this nutty tour de force has a more tender, more worldly spin.
Customer Reviews
Great read
Kept me going the whole time, at times strange and unbelievable, but you never see anything coming. A great Aussie book!