The job sucks, the life sucks and the corporate culture of the place sucks balls. The narrator works in a place called Farm, in a distant, dystopian future. SWALLOWING A DONKEY'S EYE is a subversive little piece of literature. Because I'm about to say a few kind things myself. So I think Tremblay owes Thomas a beer or something. I like to think my reviews are good, but this one literally sold me the novel. I didn't know anything about Paul Tremblay, the author until reading Richard Thomas' review of SWALLOWING A DONKEY'S EYE at The Nervous Breakdown.
So you know, the contrast is a little absurd. In Quebec, it's the prototypical name for older gentlemen, presumably logger, checkered-shirt wearing types with tree-trunk arms and a boisterous nature, who don't speak a word of English *.
Whether rebelling against regimented and ridiculous Farm life, exploring the consumer-obsessed world of City, experiencing the suffering of the homeless in Pier, or confronting the secrets of his own childhood, Swallowing a Donkey's Eye's narrator is a hilarious, neurotic, and rage-filled Quixote searching for his mother, his own dignity, and the meaning of humanity.Paul Tremblay is a hilarious name for an American writer,but you have to be french Canadian to understand why it's funny. On his desperate search to find his mother, he encounters ecoterrorists wearing plush animal suits, City's all-powerful Mayor who is infatuated with magic refrigerators and outlaw campaigns, and an over-sexed priest who may or may not have ESP, but who is most certainly his deadbeat dad. When the narrator's single mother, whom he left behind in City, falls out of contact, he fears the worst: his mother is homeless and subsequently to be deported under City to the Pier. City is sprawling, technocratic, and rests hundreds of feet above the coastline on the creaking shoulders of a giant wooden pier. Farm is the mega-conglomerate food supplier for City, populated with rabidly bureaucratic superiors, and sexually deviant tour guides dressed in chicken and duck suits.
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