The Mark and the Void : A Novel (Paperback)

from mhanlon

The setting, an Ireland in the whitewater of the economic meltdown, was good, but I didn't quite click with the Frenchman and his desperately empty life (so empty he latches on to a dodgy writer's suggestions for plot developments in it) or the feckless writer in the story.

from fizzypops

Hugely underwhelming. How NYT Book Review described this as "laugh out loud funny" escaped me, somehow. If they did mean it literally, was it funny because it made you laugh, or funny because it was pretty dismal? I persevered all the way to the end, and regretted it. The underlying story was ble...

from KateVane

This book starts promisingly. An author has apparently identified the ideal character for his next novel. Claude is a Frenchman alienated from himself, an outsider working in investment banking in the non-place that is the International Financial Services Centre, a tax haven unceremoniously dumpe...

from alexrichman

After the superb Skippy Dies, Murray swaps the boarding school for a bank. This captures the lunacy of buyouts and bailouts better than any recent novel, but it's at its best when characters are simply swapping wisecracks; plenty of books are touted as 'funny' but this one genuinely is. The plot ...

from PrimosParadise

I think this is my first 5 star book this year and while some may not be as enthralled as I was, I think for shear audacity this is well-deserved. To summarize the plot of this book would be a disservice to this book but....This is a story about an investment banker, Claude, from France working i...