The Pickle Index
A Novel
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
“The Pickle Index is full of life and everything else—it’s rowdy and sweaty and heartbreaking, and by heartbreaking I mean funny, and by funny I mean laugh-until-you’re-exhausted-and-leaking-and-hungry.”
—Miranda July
Zloty Kornblatt is the hapless ringmaster of an even more hapless circus troupe. But one fateful night, Zloty makes a mistake: he accidentally makes his audience laugh. Here on the outskirts of Burford—where both the cuisine and the economy, such as they are, are highly dependent on pickled vegetables—laughter is a rare occasion. It draws the immediate attention of the local bureaucracy, and by morning Zloty has been branded an instigator, conspirator, and fomentor sentenced to death or worse.
His only hope lies with his dysfunctional troupe—a morose contortionist, a strongman who’d rather be miming, a lion tamer paired with an elderly dog—a ragged band of misfits and failures who must somehow spring Zloty from his cell at the top of the Confinement Needle. Their arcane skills become strangely useful, and unlikely success follows unlikely success. Until, suddenly, the successes end—leaving only Flora Bialy, Zloty’s understudy and our shy narrator, to save the day.
Punctuated with evocative woodcuts by Ian Huebert, Eli Horowitz's The Pickle Index is a fast-moving fable, full of deadpan humor and absurd twists—and an innovative, exhilarating storytelling experience.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Horowitz (The Silent History) weaves a strange tale about an eccentric group of circus performers who operate within the borders of a zany, obscure, and vaguely East-European country that prides itself on its pickles and pickle recipes. When ringmaster Zloty Kornblatt is arrested for "antagonistic fomentation with a side of gratuitous slapstickery" (i.e., inspiring laughter), the other members of the circus troupe conspire to break Zloty out of his prison cell at the top of the Confinement Needle before his impending execution at Termination Field. The various talents of the troupe, ranging from the strongman to acrobat to knife-dodger, aid in their daring rescue plan. The pickle index itself is shown to be a sort of teletype, a scrolling index for "citizen-to-citizen fermentation-recipe exchange." And the Prime Mother of the pickled land, Madame J, travels with a Javanese octopus named Simeon who must be regularly spritzed with saline solution. While Horowitz certainly generates some laughs, as a sustained work of fiction, the whole conceit wears thin and the characters feel more like jokey caricatures. It is an absurd and whimsical story, a novel of pure invention, marked by Horowitz's obvious delight in devising weird names, outlandish pickled-food recipes, and bizarre judicial practices.
