Travelling Sprinkler
-
-
4.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $7.99
-
- $7.99
Publisher Description
Paul Chowder is a poet, but he's fallen out of love with writing poems. He hasn't fallen out of love with his ex-girlfriend Roz, though. In fact he misses her desperately.
As he struggles to come to terms with Roz's new relationship with a doctor, Paul turns to his acoustic guitar for comfort and inspiration, and fills his days writing protest songs, going to Quaker meetings, struggling through Planet Fitness workouts, wondering if he could become a techno DJ, and experimenting with becoming a cigar smoker.
Written in Baker's beautifully unconventional prose, and scored with musical influences from Debussy to Tracy Chapman to Paul himself, Travelling Sprinkler is an enchanting, hilarious, and deeply necessary novel.
'I think the job of the novelist is to write about interesting things, including things that might not seem all that interesting at first glance, and to offer evidence that life is worth living' Nicholson Baker
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Paul Chowder, the rambling protagonist of The Anthologist, returns in Baker's less successful latest. Between trips to Planet Fitness and disquisitions on subjects such as dance music and automobile maintenance, Chowder dwells on drones and other topics of a geopolitical nature. From lamenting his own inability to find (or keep) a girlfriend to decrying the "truly evil" nature of global agriculture industry giant Monsanto, Chowder hurls out his grievances in a gushing, sorrowful soliloquy while striving to reinvent himself by rekindling his old musical aspirations and buying himself a cheap guitar at Best Buy for his birthday. Though the stream-of-consciousness narrative wears thin, the character of Chowder epic loser and literary striver feels very real and is almost endearing. He is a study in contemporary dislocation, unable though he is to make any sense of his own condition. But that's fine; for all Chowder really craves, like the homeless guy on the corner, is an audience he can chirp at for the duration: "Hey, Junior Birdmen. I'm Paul Chowder and I'm here in the blindingness of noon near the chicken hut talking to you about the things that need to be talked about. You know what they are."
