About this title: Meet Roger, a divorced, middle-aged 'aisles associate' at a Staples outlet, condemned to restocking reams of paper for the rest of his life, and his co-worker, Bethany, who's at the end of her Goth phase and realising she's facing fifty more years of shelving Post-it notes and replenshing the Crayola boutique in Aisle Six. One day, Bethany ...
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Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Date Published: 2008
ISBN-13:9781596915008ISBN:1596915005
Description: Good. A copy that has been read, but remains in clean condition. All pages are intact, and the cover is intact (including dustcover, if applicable). The spine may show signs of wear. Pages can include limited notes and highlighting, and the copy can include "from the library of" labels. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, US
ISBN-13:9781596911062ISBN:1596911069
Description: Good. Purchasing this item supports Pierce County libraries. Thriftbooks and PCL have partnered to help raise additional funds for the library system. Ex-Library book-will contain library markings. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Good. Purchasing this book supports the King County Library System Foundation. Thriftbooks and KCLSF have partnered to help raise additional funds for the library system. Ex-Library book-will contain library markings. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Good. Former Library book. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Very Good. Former Library book. Great condition for a used book! Minimal wear. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Very good. Book has appearance of light use with no easily noticeable wear. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Date Published: 2007-10-02
ISBN-13:9781596911062ISBN:1596911069
Description: Good. Exact ISBN/item shown. Would be LIKE NEW, but missing DJ and 3 tiny bent page corners in front (title pages). Light scuffs/marks to cover. Clean and lovely inside and out. NO writing or tears. Tight binding. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Random House
Date Published: 2007
ISBN-13:9780307356284ISBN:0307356280
Description: Very Good in Fair jacket. DJ has marks, chipping, tears-Cover has edgewear, bumping-Marks on edge & few book pgs-Slightly cocked. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Date Published: 2007
ISBN-13:9780747591887ISBN:0747591881
Description: Fine. Minor rubbing to edges and extremities, otherwise brand new & unread. Next working day dispatch from the UK. Please contact us with any queries. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Date Published: 2008
ISBN-13:9780747593829ISBN:0747593825
Description: New. PAPERBACK BOOK-NEW-SHOP SOILED COPY-TRUSTED DEVON (UK) BASED SELLER-IN STOCK-SENT WITHIN 1 WORKING DAY-AVAILABLE BY EMAIL FOR QUERIES-NO QUIBBLE REFUND IF NOT COMPLETELY SATISFIED- read more
"This book started out as quite funny, with a whiff of The Office to it, then slowly descended into a mess of tangled relationships among miserable, self-loathing and annoying characters.
1. The relationships weren't in the least realistic, or even postmodern realistic, in any way. A Goth girl working at a Staples doesn't become obsessed with a divorced man in his forties. The same man doesn't decide to write letters back and forth with her, when neither character can maintain any sobriety or thought.
2. I've been in many office supply stores, and I doubt that those who work there ruminate on the possibility that they might be lifelong losers. Their minds are on their personal lives, school, and whatever else they do when they punch out. It's a job, not a condemnation. And in this economy...
3. Mixing in many choppy chapters from the aforementioned fortyish man's alcohol-soaked semi-novel made for some boredom on my part. I felt like the mixed-in chapters were merely there as a justification of the letters between he and the Goth girl, like: nobody would ever believe that these two people could care about anything enough to write, so I'm make him an aspiring novelist, so there can be a plot.
4. Letters? In the age of email?? Not hardly!
I wouldn't recommend this, even to a Staples employee. It would depress them. Reading it until the end was a chore, and has put me off PoMo lit for at least a few weeks."
"The Gum Thief initially seems to be about what all of Canadian writer Douglas Coupland's other books are about: lives of quite desperation and absurdity that is modern living.
It is thus refreshing when you discover that thus book juts might be an examination of the act of writing itself. A a series of diary entries, letters, and even installements of a novel-within-a-novel, it all begins when Roger, a divorced, alcoholic middle aged worker on the fars track to nowhere at staionery store Staples, writes a diary entry about his terrible life, ranting about everything from not investing in Microsoft to people who flash their ights on the freeway. "At least if you're bitter, you know that you're like everybody else," he says.
This is followed by a diary sccount of Bethany, a plump, Goth co-worker, "the dead girl whose locker you spat on somewhere between recess and lunch." However, we soon discover that this is not really Bthany's diary, but that Roger is impersonating her -- presumably in some sort of writerly exercise.
But when he leave his journal lying around in the staff room, Bethany finds it, and instead of being angry, starts a secret epistolary correspondence with him, like two spies in enemy territory: "Remember, no acknowledging to my face that you've read this."
They open up on the trauma of their lives -- his divorce and the death of his son, the death of various of her family members, presenting convincing if unsurprising portraits of how two people came to be as wounded and defeated as these characters are.
Their correspondence is interspersed with extracts from Roger's novel-in-progress, which he has been inspired to work on upon encouragemnet from Bethany. Titled Glove Pond, it is about a faded author-turned-academic and his eccentric actress wife, who play host to a hot young writer and his surgeon wife.
The novel -- which Roger himself summarises as "all the charactres were crazy and humanity was doomed" -- are ornately and amusing cheesy, yet have their momemts of transcendence, mirroring as they do the actual events playing out in the lives of Roger and Bethany.
As the hot young wrter character muses about the couple characters at one point: "What, he wondered, could have happened to two people to damage them so badly? What sort of event could warp them, or any of us, to the point where they became mere cartoons of the real and whole people they once were?"
But such moments are not enough to transcend this book's writing-exercise neatness -- which, to give Coupland credit, might have been his intention. Most of the characters sound the same -- snarky and self-deprecating -- while, at the risk of giving things away, the twist at the end is less Life Of Pi and more "It was all a dream"."
"estupendo libro, aunque he de decir que conmigo Coupland lo tiene fácil porque me gusta casi siempre. Algunos dicen que siempre escribe de lo mismo, y que a veces parece un stand-up comedian, y yo no solo lo confirmo sino que confieso que me encanta. Me río y emociono en un mismo párrafo y esa lucha entre estar deprimido y superfelizdelamuerte que viven todos sus personajes la encuentro de lo más real."
"Though not one of Coupland's best, still an engaging, beautiful, thought provoking novel. Coupland explores the interior world of two unlikely friends and fellow Staples employees via the letters they write to one another. The book's overarching, and wonderfully executed, questions are: 1) What does it mean to be human? 2) Can humans ever truly change, especially in an age in which we have lost faith in an apocalypse that could project meaning back on life's seemingly unrelated events? The novel's two main characters, Bethany and Roger, come alive as they begin to share their stories with one another via letter writing as well as creative writing. In typical Coupland fashion, we see that stories are crucial in defining identity and building community. Like many of Coupland's characters, Bethany laments that she was not brought up "religious"--she envies those who have an overarching story that could possibly enable them to focus on others and ignore their constant, buzzing, interior monologues--if even for just a moment.
This lovely quote from Martin Buber seems to parpahrase a good bit of what Coupland chooses to show us in this unexpectedly touching novel. "Persons appear by entering into relation to other persons.""
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