Not your everyday work of fiction

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	• Voyage to the End of the Room: A Novel Tibor Fischer Counterpoint, 2005 - 256 pages average customer review:based on 9 reviews view larger image
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Not your everyday work of fiction

Oceane is a former erotic dancer turned successful computer graphics designer who now never leaves home. We follow her strange routine through her London flat and relive her days in a Barcelona sex club. Later, as our heroine seeks her former lover, we follow her personal assistant, Audley, who is a former mercenary and now proprietor of the Dun Waitin Credit Agency.

If the premise seems thin, it's because this is a book in which the language and the interaction between characters takes precedence over matters of plot. The result is a eccentric, often funny read, as the progression of events becomes somewhat hard to follow.

A good work of fiction has nuggets of truth interspersed within it. At the very least, the reader can accept the nugget as truth, which, in a book such as this, provide the opposite of comic relief and keep the book closer to the ground. Fischer writes of Oceane's short encounter with a man with whom there is no possibility of a long-term relationship:

Juan was far too good-looking for any hope of a long-term relationship . . . Juan was perhaps to easy-going for me. It's like training dogs. You want the dog to obey you, but you can't have any real respect for a dog that always obeys you. You want a dog that occasionally goes over the wall or bites the postman without your permission; you want to be reminded that you command a subdued yet wild animal, not a crawler. A man should be strong enough to kill you with his bare hands.

Until the last sentence, the above passage captures a truth about male-female relationships that is hard to toss aside. While extending the often-used metaphor of training a man as one would a dog, Fischer takes a healthy stab at identifying the intangible qualities of a relationship that elude so many of us. Moments like this kept me turning the pages.

To be sure, this novel is not for everyone. It's a quirky, offbeat and meandering delivery, whose subject matter alone will alienate some readers. But it's fun reading from this award-winning British author.

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A disappointment at 5 stars

When I first realized Mr. Fischer had come out with a new work I got very excited. The high expectations I held for this book ultimately made this book a huge disappointment.

The plot is not tied together well, it seems more like a string of a short stories tied together through several characters loosely tied together. What Mr. Fischer is best at is providing rich detail and superb entertainment through tangential stories. However, in this book the balance is not quite right. Reminiscent of the big mac with a skewed bread to meat to cheese ratio. You need at least two more meat patties Ronald!

(But when McDonalds Francais offered the maxi-menu mega mac with 4 beef patties, it was just right. Thats a whole other story though.)

Another sad reality was the lack of vernaculous admonition that makes Mr. Fischer's work such a joy usually(whatever the heck that means).

Despite all these problems this book was still excellent and highly entertaining, considering short stories are what Mr. Fischer does best. A must read even.

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Really Big Review

The past works I've read by Tibor Fischer (The Thought Gang and The Collector Collector) have both been remarkable in their brilliance. Fischer writes with language that is multi-layered, quick-witted, and wonderfully fun to read. His mastery of the absurd and his stylized vignettes have made his books enjoyable for both long sittings in front of the fire, or a quick 10-minute jaunt while waiting for the train. Voyage to the End of the Room, tragically, does not measure up to his previous works.
This is not to say that is a bad book. It possesses a wide array of interesting language, and the situational comedy is still present in spades. The man who is crushed to death by a plummeting cow on the roof of a Barcelona sex club is a good example of this. It is a worthy exhibition of some of my favorite aspects of Fischer's writing. The reason for the aerial bovine is never explained, making it all the more entertaining.
The book also displays some very insightful observations and didactic. My favorite lies on page 204 of the paperback edition. "What I find significant is that no one seems to have Hope any more. One-off hopes exist. You hope the rain will stop, you hope you get the job, you hope you win the lottery, you hope you get to go out with someone attractive. But belief in the future seems to have no future any more." This illustrates some of the best qualities of Fischer's writing. A perceptive observation coupled with a subtle inclusion of humor. The last sentence also gives us a hint at Fischer's prowess with double meaning and wordplay.
The problems arise with the more conventional aspects of the book. The plot deals with a somewhat agoraphobic designer named Oceane. After receiving a letter from a former coworker, she hires Audley to travel to Micronesia for her and retrieve another letter from "an evil, dangerous lunatic" named Bruno. It also contains a lengthy flashback describing Oceane's employment in the aforementioned sex club. Overall, a plot that Fischer is completely capable of working with. It feels very fractured, however. The vignettes of The Collector Collector fit together with microscopic precision. Voyage to the End of the Room lacks this precision, and feels more like ill-fitting flagstone.
It also is somewhat harder to identify with the characters. Like him or not, Hubert from The Thought Gang was fairly easy to connect with. Both Audley and Oceane have very interesting premises behind their characters, and both are quite likable, however neither is fleshed out enough to allow the audience a strong connection.
This leaves a book that exists in a sort of void. Fischer's faithful readers will be somewhat put off by the change in style and quality, and the disappearance of The Thought Gang's lingual sorcery. Newcomers would be better off starting with a different book, allowing them a better taste of Fischer's style. Ultimately, the book deserves a four star rating and will add to, not detract from, Fischer's body of work, but will not be counted among his best work.

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reviews: page 1, 2

Far too set in her ways for someone her age, failed dancer turned graphic designer Oceane doesn't get out much. Luckily there's a lot you can do in your room these days...

In this completely original, deliciously raunchy novel, Tibor Fischer returns to top form to give us a story of a woman searching the world in order to understand her past. Starting in the cramped confines of a South London apartment, Voyage to the End of the Room takes its funny (and foulmouthed) heroine to the nightclubs of Barcelona, the battlefields of the Balkans, and a reckoning on the Micronesian island of Chuuk, shedding memories and finding answers along the way. Combining Fischer's trademark sardonic wit and offbeat imaginative flair, the result is a compelling page-turner that doubles as a darkly hilarious meditation on how and whether you can ever really know other people, the nature of evil, what is reality-and whether you can fake it.

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