Redback - Hardcover

Jacobson, Howard

3.21

75 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670815411 ISBN 13: 9780670815418

Publisher: Viking, 1987

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Karl Leon Forelock, a Cambridge graduate and cultural operative for the CIA, travels to Australia where he becomes involved with two synchronized swimmers

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About the Author:

Howard Jacobson has written fifteen novels and five works of non-fiction. He won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Award in 2000 for The Mighty Walzer and then again in 2013 for Zoo Time. In 2010 he won the Man Booker Prize for The Finkler Question and was also shortlisted for the prize in 2014 for his most recent novel, J.

From Publishers Weekly:

G'day, sport. Jacobson (Coming from Behind, Peeping Tom can be as funny as a drenched drongo, jes' the kind of Pommie we in Owstriylia love. His story of the conversion of Karl Leon (pronounced "Leeorhn") Forelock, Cambridge University grad in Moral Decencies, is a good example. The daft dingo was born in Partington ("there are corners of the Earth that God appears to have . . . washed His hands of altogether") and is recruited in the early '60s by a Jesuit priest to go Down Under for the CIA. Leeorhn (a member of the "intellectual 'right' ") is to save Owstriylia from "drugs, pornography . . . and the little yellow devils from the north." In the late '70s, following a decade of almost-married domesticity with a pair of synchronized swimmers, he ends up in a feminist camp in the outback named after the daughter of Spring, for whom the warmth of mortal passion is fatal. It's here that he is bitten "where no man can be indifferent to a bite" by a female Redback spider, causing him "three weeks of unshrinking verticality." What's worse, the symptoms of the bite annually recur, turning Leeorhn into a raving leftist radical. In artfully using the seemingly artless to satirize the prurient, this book would make Swift proud.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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