Read The Parade A novel Dave Eggers 9780525655305 Books

Product details Hardcover 192 pages Publisher Knopf; 1st Edition edition (March 19, 2019) Language English ISBN-10 0525655301

The Parade A novel Dave Eggers 9780525655305 Books Reviews

• In an unamed country...recovery from the civil war ...marred with corruption and burdened by a new lawless government....
  two men - named Four and Nine (security company pseudonyms), are on a 12-day assignment to repair a road before a planned parade by the President, “ known for political theater.
  
  Both of these men were anonymous and of little value... other than do their job.
  
  Four dishes out the important tasks. He’s the boss! Serious - responsible - most experienced.... sixty three different assignments in all.
  Four could be counted on to complete any job on time or early.
  He didn’t earn the nickname, ‘clock’ for no reason.
  He tells Nine
  “If you find a significant surface variation, you are
  tasked with filling it in before the RS-80 arrives, and if the variation is too large to fix, you will have to radio me, or come back to me in person. Then we can
  assess whether we power down to fix the anomaly,
  or if we just pave it over. Okay?”
  “Okay”.
  
  Nine is the complete opposite from Four....
  messy - late - women in his bed - ( whom he would gladly loan out to Four)...
  and frankly, Four considered Nine a liability.
  
  Nine is a character- but Four doesn’t consider anything about him funny - not his hair that impedes his vision...pushing it out of the way a hundred times a day - nor his feminine mouth.
  
  I won’t say more about this new novel...as it would be too easy to give spoilers...
  Other than....
  This spare novel is fierce...
  an evocative story....
  Dave Eggers prose touched me right in my gut!
  
  elyse
• Eggers has generally disappointed me as of late. With some exceptions, I haven't truly enjoyed one of his books since YSKOV, which was ages ago. But, like a good loyalist, I've always gone out to buy his latest novel upon release.
  
  The Parade is more of a novella than a novel.
  
  I wanted to give this five, but there were parts near the beginning that I found really slow and boring. Having said that, when I got to about halfway through it really started to pick up and like JJ Abrams' approach to just about everything, Eggers kept leaving dangling threads that made me want to read more and more.
  
  I usually read a chapter or two before bed, but this weekend I powered through the last half of the book because I had to know how it was going to end.
  
  Man, the ending is really something. The sort that makes you utter a long drawn out expletive.
• Barely a novella, a shaggy dog story and a dark joke with a final sentence gut-punch punchline. Topical, certainly. Well-intentioned, surely. Subtle and sometimes beautiful prose, in service of a story that stops without concluding. Nobility and Savagery feature. The protagonists are thinly-sketched. The locals are ciphers. What could have been a particular and universal story collapses, in the absence of a third act or change of heart, into something resembling an allegory, but without the power of fable.
• When Dave Eggers wants to make a point, he writes a book. And whereas some are definitely more successful, his intent more clear, there is no one who can come close. My favorites are those in which he presents a larger picture by focussing on a smaller, more personal story (such as Zeitoun, What is the What, and the Monk of Mocha). I slip this one into the same slat as The Circle and Hologram for the King. His point here is his own, and if it not as accessible as some of his other works, I'll keep reading anything he writes.
• I'll say one thing for it, like the road, it moves along at a blistering pace. So it's quick read kind of like a comic book and that's about the quality of the imagination that wrote it. The road goes nowhere except back to the barbarism, etc. it was supposed to celebrate, another book for the junk heap.
• Wow, what a horrible waste of time. I’m not going to bother with this author again. This is a bloated, short story by an arrogant writer without humanity. It’s a boring waste of time.
• This was a strange book - almost Kubrick-like. Something tells me that I’ll have a satori about what it means in a year.
• Dave Eggers does not disappoint. It was a quick read but but full of characters we all know and hold within ourselves. We see where trusting no one and good intentions get us. I am glad someone is shining a light on isolationist attitude and self absorption in a modern way. Well done Dave.