Book of the day: Lights Out in Wonderland (paperback edition) by DBC Pierre
There isn’t a name for my situation. Firstly because I decided to kill myself. And then because of this idea:
I don’t have to do it immediately.
Whoosh – through a little door. It’s a limbo.
I need never answer the phone again or pay a bill. My credit score no longer matters. Fears and compulsions don’t matter. Socks don’t matter. Because I’ll be dead. And who am I to die? A microwave chef. A writer of pamphlets. A product of our time. A failed student. A faulty man. A bad poet. An activist in two minds. A drinker of chocolate milk, and when there’s no chocolate, of strawberry and sometimes banana.
In times geared to the survival of the fittest – not the fittest.
Cover blurb:
Gabriel Brockwell, aesthete, poet, philosopher, disaffected twenty-something decadent, is looking to end it all with one last journey of excess. Taking in London, Tokyo, Berlin and the Galapagos Islands, Lights Out In Wonderland documents Gabriel Brockwell’s remarkable global odyssey. Committed to the pursuit of pleasure to obliterate all previous parties, Gabriel’s adventure takes in a spell in rehab, a near-death experience with fugu ovaries, a sexual encounter with an octopus, and finally an orgiastic feast in the bowels of Berlin’s majestic Tempelhof Airport. Along the way we see a character disintegrate and re-shape before our eyes.
An allegorical banquet and a sly commentary on the march towards mindless banality, DBC Pierre’s third novel is an unexpectedly joyful expression of the human spirit.
The altogether different look the book possessed in trade paperback:
and for the US edition:
