Doctor Criminale
A satire from the Booker Prize-shortlisted author of The History Man
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- €6.99
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- €6.99
Publisher Description
‘Eminently readable . . . perceptive and poignant’ Time Out
A London Magazine Book of the Year
Francis Jay is a man of the nineties. Street-wise but eco-friendly, smart yet charmingly naive, when his journalism career falls on the rocks he sets out to salvage it by embarking on a quest to write about one of the greatest philosophers of the modern age for a TV documentary. The myth of Doctor Bazlo Criminale proves almost impossible to penetrate, but Jay doggedly pursues the doctor from congress to congress, from woman to woman and from muse to muse: just who is the mysterious Criminale?
Written after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Malcolm Bradbury's Doctor Criminale shows a world where old ideologies are coming apart at the seams.
'An energetic satire of literary journalism and literary theory in the post-postmodern nineties . . . A relic of a time when we respected intelligence enough to satirise it' - The London Magazine
Part of the Picador Collection, a series celebrating fifty years of Picador books and showcasing the best of modern literature.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
British novelist and critic Bradbury has a wicked satirical eye for academic and literary pretensions, and he has exercised it notably in such works as The History Man and Rates of Exchange. This time, although his eye is no less sharp, his target is altogether larger: nothing less than the role of the European intellectual at a time of the collapse of nations. national unrest. Hero Francis Jay is a trendy but basically decent ``journo''--a literary scribbler for London's Sunday papers. Inveigled by a rapacious girlfriend into researching a TV show about the mysterious Bazlo Criminale, a world-renowned philosopher who has dwelt with apparent ease on both sides of the former Iron Curtain, Jay sets off to find his man. By way of Vienna and Budapest, he runs Criminale to earth at a hilarious literary-political conference at an American millionaire's villa in North Italy and begins to observe him; by the time he has met and talked to him--and also met a former wife living in Argentina, bedded a former girlfriend and thought somewhat beyond his usual scope--Jay has decided that life, even the intellectual life, is both more serious and more perilous than his glib worldview has allowed for. So the novel is high comedy with a quite serious undertone, never less than brilliantly entertaining and written with considerable sophistication; Bradbury has even performed the difficult feat of creating a great philosopher who is as magnetic on the page as he is said to be in life.
