if you don't read this you're stupid :oP (Don't Read This Book If You're Stupid - Tibor Fischer)

Member Name: pje

Product:	Don't Read This Book If You're Stupid - Tibor Fischer
Date:	24/10/01 (71 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Sharp and witty.

Disadvantages: None, unless you're stupid.

This book consists of seven short stories, the first and last of which could be considered novellas, and they go like this:


WE ATE THE CHEF is about a man who runs his own business designing websites, but wishes he was just an ordinary employee without all the responsibility and worry: "Being your own boss boiled down to choosing which arse you hoped to lick next or which pile of shit you shovelled next; that was it." When he takes his first holiday for eight years, having been invited to share a villa in Nice with an old schoolfriend, it turns out that two Russian girls and his main business rival have been invited along too...


Now what chance does a man called John Smith have of becoming
a successful artist? That's one thing that troubles the protagonist of PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A FOAMING DEATHMONGER.
This tale tells how this particular John Smith became a serial killer, or 'ghostbreeder' as he puts it. It's all to do with a new form of art he invents, which he calls a "grabby" or "personalised fabulation". In other words, he's a billshutter...


FIFTY USELESSNESSES is about "The Bramhall Kid" a 52-year-old whose fellow Wild West enthusiasts in The Bramhall District Frontier History Recreation Society have drifted away for various reasons. He has quit his job as a town planner (which he gained through a bogus C.V.) and is heading for his final shoot-out...


In THEN THEY SAY YOU'RE DRUNK we meet Guy, who feels like he is surrounded by a world full people who are stupid and/or revolting. Not unlike Ignatius J. Reilly in A Confederacy of Dunces.
Guy comes into contact with some pretty hopeless petty criminals in the course of his work for a solicitor in Brixton, but everywhere he looks he sees these "barkers"...

"In a corner of the concourse, a stonehenge of drunks and section thirty-sevens was laughing at th
e funniest joke in the world.
The king of the dossers was holding court."

"A strand of snot, a foot long, dangled like a dipstick from his right nostril [...] the man with the metronomic catarrh."


ICE TONIGHT IN THE HEARTS OF YOUNG VISITORS is set in Romania at the time of the fall of the Ceaçescu régime. A journalist travels from Budapest across the border into Romania, to a small town beset by the confusion of revolution and fear of the consequences if it fails. "The Securitate is coming. We will die."
Less than eight pages long, this is a tremendous piece of writing.


BOOKCRUNCHER is named after the logo on the twelve-year-old
T-shirt worn by a man with thirty-two library cards. So determined is he to read everything, that he reads two books at a time -
one in each hand. Only by doing this can he then write something original. (After all, how can he be sure it's original if he hasn't read everything else?) Not content with spending all his time skulking around libraries and bookshops in the daytime, he tries to get locked in overnight too. This is how important books are to him:

"Books were made of hope, not paper. Hope that someone would read your book; hope that it would change the world or improve it; hope that people would agree with you, hope that people might believe you; hope that you'll be remembered, celebrated,
hope that people would feel something. Hope that you would learn something; hope that you'll entertain or impress; hope you'll catch some cash; hope that you'll be proved right and hope that you'll be proved wrong."

He is also offered an elephant for $100 in New York, but declines.
I would quite like a Bookcruncher T-shirt, I think it would suit me.
A dooyoo T-shirt would be nice too, but only if they drop the price by, say, 40%...


Finally, I LIKE BEING KILLED centres on the London com
edy scene. Miranda is an unsuccessful stand-up comedienne, in fact the only person she knows who earns less than her is her best friend Viv, who's a nurse. But she's still more than a match for the men in her life: "Men in the main were easier to deal with than budgies.
Or her boiler. The boiler had three controls, and she had had more trouble operating that than most men." As for her current partner Tony: "The prospect of Tonysex did nothing for her, but in the way a champion has to be able to produce even when under the weather or beset by tabloid troubles, she wrung his brains out."

Like most of Fischer's characters she is irritated by other people's inconsiderateness, and yet she's quite self-centred herself.
She also ends up climbing Nelson's Column with no clothes on...


Tibor Fischer was born in Stockport in 1959, and has written three novels: Under The Frog, The Thought Gang and The Collector Collector. He's a sharp, funny writer - if he isn't the sharpest knife in the box then it must be one of those specialist sets of Japanese knives. The next time I see one of his books I'm going to pick it up and read it. I recommend you do the same.

Congratulations on not being stupid by the way!

¶ Paperback: £6.99 ¶ pp248 ¶ ISBN: 0099283123 ¶
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