The Portable Veblen
Shortlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction 2016
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- 6,99 €
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- 6,99 €
Publisher Description
A laugh-out-loud love story with big ideas – and squirrels
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILEYS WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2016
Can squirrels speak? Do snails scream?
Will a young couple, newly engaged, make it to their wedding day? Will their dysfunctional families ruin everything? Will they be undone by the advances of a very sexy, very unscrupulous heiress to a pharmaceuticals corporation?
Is getting married even a remotely reasonable idea in the twenty-first century?
And what in the world is a ‘Veblen’ anyway?
‘Raw and weird and hilarious’ Guardian
‘A touching, wildly funny and peculiarly elegant look at the travails of love of all kinds’ Sunday Express
‘Elizabeth McKenzie is clearly some sort of genius’ Paul Murray
‘I can’t remember a book I enjoyed more’ Nina Stibbe
‘Seriously funny and extraordinarily well written’ Jonathan Franzen, Guardian books of the year
Reviews
‘Man oh man, do I love this book! Audacious, imaginative and totally wonderful’ Karen Joy Fowler
‘I can’t remember a book I enjoyed more’ Nina Stibbe
'Smart, funny, charming and profound. Elizabeth McKenzie is clearly some sort of genius’ Paul Murray
‘The squirreliest novel I ever read. I enjoyed it completely’ Ursula K. Le Guin
‘Raw and weird and hilarious . . . very entertaining’ Scarlett Thomas, Guardian
‘Ambitious, spirited, funny, daring’ Financial Times
‘A touching, wildly funny and peculiarly elegant look at the travails of love of all kinds’ Sunday Express
‘Utterly charming. A true joy of a book’ Irish Examiner
‘Full of life and humour and compassion’ Times Literary Supplement
‘Darkly funny, irrepressibly quirky and very, very hard to put down’ Sam Baker, The Pool
‘Quirky and smart. If you loved Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, you’ll love this’ Glamour
‘Wildly brilliant. Razor-sharp, intimate, hilarious and profound. Every page is a delight’ Emma Jane Unsworth
‘Terrifically entertaining . . . hard to resist’ Daily Mail
‘Offbeat, thoughtful, mischievous . . . McKenzie [has] a pin-sharp eye for the tragic-comic, and for dialogue’ Herald (Scotland)
‘A novel of festive originality’ The New York Times
‘Unforgettable. A wild ride that you will not want to miss’ San Francisco Chronicle
‘If The Portable Veblen has a flaw, it is that its caricatures are so on the nose as to make the reader hope to flee the human race’ Boston Globe
‘Oddball characters and plot turns abound, including talking squirrels and bureaucratic ironies worthy of "Catch-22." But a sober question occupies its core: Do our parents' best intentions do us harm?’ Minneapolis Star Tribune
‘Accurately and funnily capture[s] the complexities of modern families . . . The Corrections meets The Wallcreeper’ Huffington Post
About the author
Elizabeth McKenzie’s work has appeared in the New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and the Pushcart Prize anthology. She received her MA from Stanford, was an assistant fiction editor at The Atlantic, and currently teaches creative writing at Stanford’s school of continuing studies.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A marriage proposal opens this offbeat and winning novel by New Yorker contributor and author McKenzie (Stop That Girl). Thirty-year-old Veblen Amundsen-Hovda, "independent behaviorist... and freelance self," has only known Paul Vreeland, a 34-year-old neurologist, for three months. This might explain Veblen's feeling of trouble, "as if rushing toward a disaster," when she says yes to his marriage proposal. Veblen, a Palo Alto resident, is named for Thorstein Veblen, an economist from the beginning of the 20th century, popularly known for coining the term conspicuous consumption; our heroine Veblen shares some of his concerns and critiques about modern capitalism. Paul, who is finding his footing as a scientist of note and growing ambition (his device for treating traumatic brain injury is fast-tracked by a powerful pharmaceutical company), is anxious to cast off his hippie upbringing and live a life with all the traditional hallmarks of success. We learn the differences between these two at the same time as they do, meeting their eccentric and dysfunctional families for the first time (including Veblen's mother, Melanie, a narcissist to end all narcissists), and seeing how they respond to situations that grow increasingly out of their control. McKenzie writes with sure-handed perception, and her skillful characterization means that despite all of Veblen's quirks she's an amateur Norwegian translator with an affinity for squirrels she's one of the best characters of the year. McKenzie's funny, lively, addictive novel is sure to be a standout.
