Directionless. Probably the best part of this book is the title. It incorrectly insinuates some SciFi plot. Instead, the contemporary story revolves around a close-to-retirement, failed consultant. His one final chance is to use a network connection to secure a Middle East business contract. However, his presentation is low priority and he must wait an unknown amount of days or weeks for his opportunity. The book is filled with the irrelevant events until his meeting. By far the worst book my club has selected :(

Themes:
Going to the tent everyday
Tumor
Suicide neighbor
Insomnia
Colleagues
Ex wife
Father
Yousef
Doctor
King ( )

Great and easy and fun read. But the NYT has this as one of the 5 best fiction books of 2012, which seems like a bit of overrate. Also: very much a "guy" book: by a guy, about two guys, the women characters are 2 that the main character fools around with, and an ex-wife and daughter that we never actually meet. ( )

I love Eggers! ( )

Not worth the time. Dreary story about a loser. ( )

Small novel about globalization, whereby an American salesman in his mid-50s hopes to recoup his business luck by selling an advanced IT package to the king of Saudi Arabia for use in his advanced city in the desert that is not quite taking off. Alan needs the money to pay off his many debtors and advance his daughter’s school career. He gets sent to Saudi-Arabia because he once met a distant cousin to the Saudi king, which supposedly gives him and his consortium a cutting edge in the business.

But once there, Alan and his young team of tech whizz kids (capable of conjuring up a hologram of one of their London based colleagues) find themselves in a huge circus tent, with hardly any internet and no-one to attend to them in a city consisting of a collection of empty buildings of marble and stones. The vacuousness extends for weeks. The king can come any moment. Alan interacts with a Danish consultant lady, who takes him to some drunken orgies. But Alan can’t get it up anymore. He keeps on trying to write to his daughter in drunken stupors. The only thing going for him is his relationship with a local driver in a clapped-out car. Alan tells him jokes, to great acclaim. Meanwhile we get a perfect description of the kind of collapse of Industrial America, where all jobs and manufacturing has been outsourced to Asia, over time. The back cloth to Trump’s rise. At some stage Alan joins his driver to the latter’s ancestral home in the desert, and goes on a hunting party at night, where he almost shoots a young herdsboy (mistaking him for a wolf). Next Alan receives surgery on a lymphoma in his neck, and then engages with the Saudi female surgeon.

The end is swift and devastating – the king visits, the hologram show works perfectly, but the King ignores Alan, proceeds to the next door building, is seen leaving shaking hands of Chinese businessman, and then it turns out that Alan’s consortium has won no contract. Alan decides to hang on to see whether it is nevertheless possible to gain some next contract. End.

Wow, this is so vacuous. It confirms all my prejudice against Saudi Arabia as a place of no interest whats-o-ever. And Eggers paints a shrill picture of the globalized world – devoid of values or feelings, whereby modern-day (migrant) slaves do the work and the elite enjoys a completely morally decrepit life. And America does not matter anymore. ( )