The Imposters
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- 3,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
The Imposters is the first novel in stories that Tom Rachman has written since his international bestseller The Imperfectionists.
'An astonishing achievement - brutally funny, humane, dizzying - will win Rachman the readership he deserves' Patrick Gale
'Easily the best thing I have read in ages' Rebecca Wait
'Clever and full of tricks from start to finish' Spectator
It's set during a crisis in democracy, a society in lockdown linked digitally but convulsed by a social media frenzy, and is told by a little-known, little-read Dutch novelist named Dora Frenhofer who has decided that her life as an old woman in this post-truth pandemic world has become too much.
But like a twenty-first century Scheherazade Dora spins stories to fend off the evil day, conjuring connections from her past to give meaning to the present. She imagines the fate of her missing brother, lost on the hippie trail in India in the sixties; the loneliness of her estranged daughter Beck, whose career writing stand-up shows for Netflix dramatizes the culture wars; Danny, an almost equally unfashionable writer she meets at a festival; the tortured history of the van driver who takes her unwanted books away; the nonchalant courier who nearly ran her over in the rain; her former lover, the sophisticated food critic; her last remaining friend. And finally, Dora's own last chapter.
The Imposters is Rachman at his inimitable best, a writer whose formal ingenuity and flamboyant technique is matched by his humanity and generosity.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rachman returns with a droll if uneven novel in stories, the form he used with such brilliance in The Imperfectionists, this time charting the lonely days of a Dutch novelist. Dora Frenhofer, it seems, is inventing fictional characters to replace the people no longer in her life. In her commitment to writing, she's spurned friends and family, including her children, though her sacrifice hasn't yielded many readers. Rachman's narrative, in turn, comprises Dora's stories. One, titled "The novelist's estranged daughter," takes the point of view of Dora's daughter, Beka, a California comedy writer going stir crazy during the Covid-19 lockdown. Some are captivating, especially "The man who took all the books away," a harrowing and Kafkaesque tale of a young Syrian man's imprisonment for possessing a borrowed phone containing a video satirizing the country's president. Others, though funny, have less heft, such as "A writer from the festival," which tracks a third-rate novelist's misadventures as he tries to promote his work ("Come one, come all," reads his advertisement for a reading; in the end, Dora writes, "All couldn't make it. Nor could one"). Rachman remains a master comic stylist, but here the whole is less than its gleaming parts.
