The Pleasures Of Queueing

• The Pleasures Of Queueing
• Price: $18.00
• The Pleasures of Queueing
• Price: $18.00
• Erik Martiny
• Fiction
• ISBN 978-1-7320091-1-0
• LCCN 2018934094
• May 15, 2018

REVIEWS

The Irish Times
The London Magazine
The Iowa Review
Kenyon Review (Interview)
Litro

ABOUT

When Olaf Montcocq emerges from the plush seclusion of his mother’s uterus in the early 1970s, his parents turn out to be a good deal more than he bargained for. His mother Anne is an ultra-Catholic, alt-feminist Irishwoman and Martin his father a disturbingly eccentric Frenchman convinced that the Second World War is a moveable feast. But Olaf’s predicament doesn’t stop there. Anne’s beliefs make her staunchly anti-contraception and Martin happens to be unstoppably oversexed. Before long, Olaf is surrounded by a horde of bickering siblings that make queueing for basic amenities an inescapable feature of his life. By the time he starts to compose the Great Franco-Irish Family Chronicle, Olaf discovers that attempting to put pen to paper in a household of twenty plus children is about as easy as trying to concentrate with your head in a beehive. Seeking to find relief from overcrowding and parental eccentricity, Olaf encounters a series of disconcerting young women who will drive him to even greater distraction. Will he and his siblings be able to inhibit his parents’ procreative frenzy in time to save the household from mayhem? Can he juggle his increasingly outlandish relationships without losing his marbles? Erik Martiny’s madcap comedy takes the reader on a whirligig of a ride through a post-hippy world of bicultural collisions.

PRAISE

“A raunchy, gargantuan, irreverent dash through the fields of ripeness and desire, spiced by history with a lightly borne trail of cultural baggage. (Reads like fun).”
–George Szirtes, critic for The Times, winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize

“With The Pleasures of Queuing Erik Martiny joins Aidan Higgins, Julian Gough, Kevin Barry, on the more exuberant wing of the Irish comic novel. His is a frothy mix of cosmopolitanism and theologico-sexual intrigue, but echoing with an unmistakable steel behind the ribald laughs.”
–David Wheatley, critic for The Guardian, winner of Rooney Prize for Irish Literature

“Hilarious and heartfelt in equal measure, Erik Martiny’s story of bohemia and bountiful creation has the verve and nerve and verbal inventiveness of early Philip Roth.”
–Lee Jenkins, editor of The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Poetry

“The Pleasures of Queuing is an irresistible addition to the distinguished recent annals of the Irish comic novel. The breathless eloquence of Martiny’s narrative sweep through the eccentricities of his version of Cork doesn’t allow the reader a moment’s pause.”
–Bernard O’Donoghue, Oxford University, winner of the Whitbread Prize

“Shot through with devastating humour, audacity and an unfettered imagination redolent of Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex, Erik Martiny’s fiction carries the reader through a stunning, hilarious epic, chiselled in the goldsmith’s language of wild virtuoso.”
–Nicole Ollier, Professor of Literature and Gender Studies, University of Bordeaux

“The hyper-vivid prose rocks on from start to end, channeling the jesting tone of Tom Jones in a modern idiom.”
–Peter Harris, poet published in The Atlantic and Ploughshares

“With its playful, manic prose and delightful self-referentiality, The Pleasures of Queueing is a caffeinated Tristram Shandy for the globalist era. Erik Martiny has concocted an intelligent, irreverent romp of a bildungsroman.”
–Todd Nathan Thompson, author of The National Joker: Abraham Lincoln and the Politics of Satire

“Erik Martiny’s The Pleasure of Queueing is a scabrously funny, pungently corporeal comedy of (bad) manners that reminds us not only of the bodily co-ordinates of Irish writers such as Beckett and Donleavy, and the visceral emphases of French Surrealism, but of the work of William Burroughs and his rendition of ‘the copulating universe’, all packed into the trials and tribulations of one family. Hold on tight.”
–Geoff Ward, Deputy Vice Chancellor of Cambridge University