The Tuvache family is not the happiest of families on earth. Better yet, husband, wife and their two children are kind of depressed and negatively minded all the time. It’s not that they are bothered by this fact, it’s just the way they are, the way they like to be and even the way they attempt to be. They own a suicide shop that has been in the family for generations. They sell only the best stuff for killing yourself and they even give advice about what is the best way for you to do it. The world isn’t that great a place, so why not help the people who cannot find their way.
’Problems’ begin with the birth of the youngest child, Alan. He is smiling in his crib, something that is unheard of in the family. He grows up as the incurable optimist and the Tuvache’s don’t know how to handle this constant perkiness. They try everything to get him depressed, but nothing works. There must be something to his way of viewing the world, there really must be.…..

I really enjoyed myself reading this book. It has enough humor and pace to keep reading chapter after chapter (…oh, just one more) and before you know it you have read the last word. (Try not to get too depressed about that or anything else for that matter.)

The Weblog Review Please contact leg…@theotherbookreview.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana

This is what Ionesco himself says about his play (translated):
It’s not even a satire: it’s the fairly objective description of a process of inflammation, of a development of a totalitarianism that’s spreading, that propagates, captures, that’s changing a world. And this world will be totally changed because after all it’s about totalitarianism.

The play is about people changing into rhinoceroses. At first there are only a few, but in a few hours time there are more rhinoceroses than there are humans left. At first the characters don’t know why these changes are happening, but as the play progresses the main character Berenger notices that the change is made voluntarily. People are curious about what is new, so they want to know what it is to be a rhinoceros. After that they just want to be part of something, don’t want to be an outsider, so if they see that the world is changing around them, they change with it. After the change all the people look the same, they lost their individuality to be part of something greater. Only Berenger stays a human, he wants to be an individual, keep thinking for himself. He doesn’t go with the communal hysteria that captures the people around him. His last words are: I don’t capitulate!

Although Ionesco’s way is absurd (humans changing into rhinoceroses), he gets the message across loud and clear. He describes the process what happened i.e. during WO II. He also makes it very clear that it can happen to everybody everywhere.
Translated from the French I’ve read this play in Dutch, but I don’t think that had any effect on the story told. It was just brilliant.

The Weblog Review Please contact leg…@theotherbookreview.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana

A clerk in a dock industry is talked into a new profession: selling food and more particularly: cheese. He becomes the distributor for Belgium and Luxemburg. He always felt little and of no importance, but now he has the chance to prove himself. The only problem is, he has no idea how to be a (good) businessman and after only a few days of being a cheese expert he is forced to make a difficult decision; keep trying or go back to his old self and be happy with it.

A very Dutch book, in old Dutch spelling. This will probably be lost in the English translation and I have no idea how that will effect the story, because I read the book in Dutch. I think though the problems the main character encounters are universal; feeling unimportant in the job and as a human, wanting to change it and having a hard time doing so, with even a harder time deciding to go back to being a very small part in the world again. The process of these choices made are very well written down by Elsschot and I felt the struggles the main character had to go through. I could understand his wanting to be somebody after feeling a nobody for so long, being heard at parties where he was always ignored. I could also see that the world he got into wasn’t his world at all. The differences of the two worlds were well worked out by the author. Only a very small book, but if you have the chance you should read it.

The Weblog Review Please contact leg…@theotherbookreview.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana