The Thought Gang (Economics) - Hardcover

Fischer, Tibor

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1565842863 ISBN 13: 9781565842861

Publisher: The New Press, 1995

Synopsis

Tibor Fischer’s first novel Under the Frog was one of the most widely praised books in England in 1993. That book followed the fortunes of two young men in the pursuit of sex and the avoidance of work as part of a traveling basketball team in the Hungary of the 1950s, and everyone from Salman Rushdie to A.S. Byatt responded with unbridled enthusiasm.

Now comes his eagerly awaited follow-up, another hilarious chronicle of an unusual dynamic duo—this time chasing after something quite different—and the London papers are even more enthusiastic. The Thought Gang is an unabashedly comic novel of ideas and uncertainty. It is a philosophical novel (or perhaps just a novel about a philosopher). It is also an unusually cinematic novel. As the Sunday Telegraph said, “There are novels which are crying out so loudly to be made into films that you cannot read them without a cinematic version taking shape in your mind, frame by frame, as you turn the pages. Tibor Fischer&rsquos The Thought Gangis one of them.” Perhaps it could best be described as Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction crossed with Woody Allen’s classic comedy Love and Death.

The setting is France; our hero, a washed-up middle-aged British philosopher named Eddie Coffin. Broke and unsure as to his next meal, he meets Hubert, an incompetent, freshly released, one-armed robber, and the “thought gang” is born. Applying philosophy to larceny, these unlikely bandits question the meaning of life, the value of money, and the role of banks as they wind their way from Montpellier to Toulon in search of the greatest heist in history. Unexpected and volatile, The Thought Gang is the hilarious and thought-provoking story of their travails.

About this title

Review:

A black comedy in the grand tradition of word-drunk intellectuals-en-dementia, The Thought Gang follows the larcenous adventures of blackout alcoholic philosopher Eddie Coffin, who, in the wake of scandal, flees his professorship in England to begin the next logical step in his career: robbery. Coffin and his new partner in crime and metaphysics, Hubert the one-armed armed robber, road-trip across the Continent in a spree of crime and epistemology, arguing a cracked history of Western philosophy and plumbing the meaning of life. Fischer was named by Granta as one of the best young British novelists of 1994; his first novel, Under the Frog, was a Booker Prize semifinalist.

From the Back Cover:

The setting is France: our hero, a washed-up middle-aged British philosopher named Eddie Coffin. Broke and unsure as to his next meal, he meets Hubert, an incompetent, freshly-released, one-armed armed robber, and the "thought gang" is born. Applying philosophy to larceny, these unlikely bandits question the meaning of life, the value of money, and the role of banks as they wind their way from Montpellier to Toulon in search of the greatest heist in history. Unexpected and volatile, The Thought Gang is the hilarious and thought-provoking story of their travails.

About this edition

• Publisher: The New Press
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 1565842863
• ISBN 13: 9781565842861
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320