Readopolis
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- £10.99
Publisher Description
From award-winning writer Bertrand Laverdure comes Readopolis, a novel translated by Oana Avasilichioaei.
It's 2006 and down-and-out protagonist Ghislain works as a reader for a publishing house in Montreal. He's bored with all the wannabe writers who are determined to leave a trace of their passage on earth with their feeble attempts at literary arts. Obsessed by literature and its future (or lack thereof), he reads everything he can in order to translate reality into the literary delirium that is Readopolis--a world imagined out of Chicago and Montreal, with few inhabitants, a convenience store, a parrot, and all kinds of dialogues running amok: cinematic, epistolary, theatrical, and Socratic.
In the pages of Readopolis, Laverdure playfully examines the idea that human beings are more connected by their reading abilities than by anything else. Funny and sardonic, whimsical and tragic, this postmodern novel with touches of David Foster Wallace and Raymond Queneau portrays the global village of readers that the Internet created, even before the 2.0 revolution.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Laverdure (Lectod me) centers this extremely funny novel on Ghislain, a poorly paid reader for a publishing house, who's working at a Montreal d panneur (convenience store) to "honour his obligations as a tenant and small pleasures as a cultural consumer." He feels superior to most writers he has to read but admires anyone who can finish writing a book. Books reading and thinking about reading are his life; Readopolis is an imaginary state (in both senses of the word) that he enters through reading and through connections with other readers. The novel contains multitudes: ongoing dialogues between different characters, ranging from the banal to the intensely philosophical; a fictional parrot that crashes the plot; reflections on the pyramid scheme of the contemporary education industry; a plethora of literary and cultural references; and illuminating meditative analyses on convenience stores as object lessons in consumer capitalism. This is a book for book lovers, particularly anyone who feels a flare of recognition when Ghislain, asked why he continues to slog his guts out in the arts world when he is "only symbolically remunerated," answers thus: "I'm stubborn.... People feel less sorry for me when I tell them, I'm not rich, but at least I work in my field.' "
