The Tao of Da-da: or, Strong Winds Can Blow All Day Depending on How Much Sugar Has Been Ingested

by Gary Clemenceau

"This might be the funniest, most original parenting book ever written." ~Rich Cavett

Sample Tao of Da-da parenting wisdom:

Empty your mind of all thoughts. / Like you had any left?
Let your heart be at peace / but try to stay conscious.
Watch the turmoil born of Small Beings / but only contemplate using the duct tape...

The Tao of Da-da marries a haggard dad's hilarious, self-deprecating view of his own role with select funniness from his award-winning blog "Triumph of a Man Called Da-da." In truth, EVERY DAY you survive as a parent is a triumph, and somewhere in there is The Way, or The TAO of Da-da.

A true original, Gary Clemenceau (aka, "A Man Called Da-da") is rapidly becoming known for writing quietly zany, singular books of deep imagination that are at once funny and true -- and occasionally phantasmagorical. Note that this parody of the Tao the Ching also includes original photos, illustrations, and parental parodies of unwavering oddity... basically things parents often step on in the middle of the night.

Genres: Contemporary, Novels, Book Club, Drama, Humor, Satire, Comedy

195 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 5, 2000

About the author

Cult author, artist. Usually not boring. He's just this guy, y'know?

**Multi-winner of Frank Herbert, and Ernest Hemingway lookalike contests.**

Reviews

[Melissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very strange and wonderful book. It's written in first-person, so we're at the mercy of the protagonist's current thought system and stress level, so things are extremely dense and claustrophobic at the beginning, opening up then rolling down... then back UP the roller coaster, to a phantasmagorical ending that i had to read twice. Clemenceau has done nothing less than create a postmodern classic. The only problem with this book is that it's NOT currently available in anything but hardback. Some publisher should take up the slack here. A gem.

[E. Spengler · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an amazing work. Clemenceau is someone to watch.

[Soochi Sandhiya · Rating 5 out of 5]

You don't need any background in finance to enjoy the book titled "Banker's Holiday", as at its core, it's a story about human emotions rather than numbers. The book explores burnout, identity, and the quiet bravery it takes to step away from a life that no longer feels meaningful. For anyone who has ever felt stuck in a routine or overwhelmed by expectations, this novel reveals that starting over can be a liberating experience.

The story follows Cincinnatus Fuller, an accomplished banker who suddenly becomes painfully aware of how hollow and suffocating his corporate world has become for him, with its mundane routine and lack of anything refreshing to explore. This sparks an idea of leaving everything behind and embracing a simple yet meaningful life.

The story unfolds with well-knit subplots as the Banker's personalities slowly begin to question what truly matters. The author has created surreal moments that convey subtle wisdom, illustrating how easily work can consume a person. He successfully conveyed the importance of pausing, stepping back, and rediscovering a purpose.

[Grymm Gevierre · Rating 5 out of 5]

Clemenceau has created a fun and unique concept in a way I haven't encountered before. I'm really impressed by its relevance—some aspects feel evergreen—while still being easy and enjoyable to read. There's a lot of humor and insight that keep it engaging.

The main character, Fuller, often grapples with his two conflicting selves, both shaped by his unusual but impactful past. One side benefits from the successes and influence of his parents during his early childhood, while the other is more reminiscent of his parents' more bohemian lifestyle.

Fuller perceives the world as on a crash-course, contemplating his place and role in it, and he realizes how maddeningly mindless everything can be. Not mindless in the sense of lacking intelligence, but more like zombies—where the essential parts of our identity get stripped away in lifelong pursuit of success. Of course these things all clash, creating a fantastic series of circumstances that make up this great book.

I’m amazed this book isn’t better known—I absolutely recommend it.

[Danelle✍🏽 Reviewer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Banker’s Holiday: A Novel of Fiscal Irregularity by Gary Clemenceau centers around Cincinnatus Stillman Fuller, an accomplished banker who experiences an epiphany like no other while in a meeting with his staff. As he’s contemplating life and its meaning, Stillman discovers that everyone around him has turned into flesh-eating zombies. Horrified, Stillman makes his escape donning a janitor's uniform, and decides that he wants to start over. However, the corporate monsters just won’t let him. What follows is a journey of self-discovery, leaving behind what doesn’t benefit you, and learning what true happiness actually means.

Banker’s Holiday exposes the corporate world in a humorous yet accurate way. Power and greed and control are at the forefront of it all but at what cost? Can one be truly happy at the expense of others, and what happens when you finally tire of wearing a mask? Gary Clemenceau delves into the deeper aspects of humanity and isn’t afraid to make his point heard in this artfully written thinkpiece, Banker’s Holiday. I not only found the novel extremely entertaining but also educational. If you’ve ever questioned your position in life or wanted to start over, then Banker’s Holiday is definitely for you.

[Cywizard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Banker’s Holiday starts with a man who finally looks up from the ledgers and sees the room for what it is. Not a temple. Not even a boardroom. More like a terrarium where the biggest reptiles wear silk. Cincinnatus Stillman Fuller is a billionaire with a name that sounds like a dare, and in the middle of a Monday meeting he comes apart. Not in a cheap meltdown kind of way. More like a lucid snap. He sees senior leadership as brooding luxurious zombies and, honestly, the image lands because it is funny and bleak at the same time. I felt it in my stomach. Then he bolts. He throws away the version of himself that has been polished to a hard shine, slips into a janitor’s clothes, and drives off in a battered pickup like a man walking out of a museum and choosing the weather instead.

What follows is a road story and a hall of mirrors. Fuller heads toward an upstate refuge that feels like an accidental paradise where the coffee tastes like rain and the locals have their own secret weather. The prose slides between deadpan and fever dream. One page you are in an office that smells like old money and printer toner. The next page you are staring up at a thousand foot Nixon who is both absurd and a little terrifying. Yes, I laughed. Then I felt that weird live wire under the joke. Which is kind of the point. This novel refuses to separate the comedy of wealth from the horror of what wealth can do to a person’s sense of scale.

Gary Clemenceau writes like someone who has listened carefully in rooms where people speak softly about ruin. He gives us corporate rituals that feel like liturgy and he also gives us grime. Mop water. Windburn. Static on a cheap radio. The contrast works. Fuller is not a saint on retreat. He is a man with power withdrawals, trying to remember what a morning looks like when no one is paid to anticipate him. I kind of loved how messy that gets. There are passages where he tries to act small and still thinks in world destroying units. He helps and undercuts his help in the same breath. I kept wanting to pat him on the shoulder and also tell him to sit down.

The satire is wide angle but the book is interested in the intimate damage. The way jargon replaces feeling. The way a calendar turns a person into a block of time. The way loyalty is talked about as if it were a quarterly product. When Fuller stares at his former life from the outside, the language loosens. Sentences get stranger. Images bloom and then crumble like burnt popcorn. A few of the wilder set pieces wobble for me. I am still not sure how I feel about one late reveal that leans hard into the fantastical. But even when I questioned it, the mood carried me forward. The voice never fakes its authority. It just keeps its cool while the world tilts.

Characters on the margins feel real. A cleaner who understands how to erase trace and decides not to. A diner waitress who knows when a man is running and when he is simply moving his feet. A small town figure who speaks in parables that sound goofy until they cut. I would have taken ten more pages with any of them. The book is generous in that way. It lets people have their oddness without turning them into lessons.

Every now and then the novel spells out an idea I had already caught. I could have done without a few clarifying lines that tidy up what the scene already showed. That said, the overall rhythm is confident. The chapters know when to stop. The jokes are not rim shots. The sorrow never fogs over. Capitalism is both target and texture here, which makes the satire feel lived in rather than arranged.

I finished with that fizzy feeling I get when a writer swings for something large and, even when the swing goes a little wild, connects in the sweet part of the bat. A strong four stars. Memorable and a little feral. I am grateful I read it and I will be thinking about that giant presidential specter for a while, which is not a sentence I expected to write but here we are.

[Nicsscp · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bleak, funny, genuinely unsettling corporate fever dream that somehow keeps its heart.
Cincinnatus Stillman Fuller is a billionaire finance titan who realizes, mid Monday staff meeting, that his senior management has become a roomful of brooding, luxurious zombies, and that he is next if he stays. He runs, hides inside a janitor persona with a stitched name patch, buys an old pickup he christens Virgil, and drives until the city and its fluorescent rituals feel like a distant bad joke. The trouble is the phantasms follow him anyway, right down to a Giant Nixon who barrels through the snow and calls out, “Sock it to me.”
What I loved is how the book refuses to let Fuller off the hook. He is rich beyond reason, insulated, used to being obeyed, and the novel understands that money can be its own kind of coffin. Fuller is also scared, lonely, and weirdly tender in the moments when he stops performing wealth and starts noticing the world again. The book keeps returning to one stubborn question, “What’s the Best Thing in the World?”, and behind the absurdity you can feel the ache of a man trying to locate a self that is not bought, not managed, not optimized into extinction. It is satire, but it is also grief. Not for the lost millions. For the lost person.
Clemenceau’s voice is the engine, crisp satire shot through with horror and sudden sweetness. The set pieces are wild and specific: the Espresso Gulag, the Dust & Ash attorneys, a two hundred foot tall banking giant sipping scotch whiskey, the Hedgehenge rising from the river, a gnome reading a tiny book like it has the secret manual for surviving modern life. Even Fuller’s body gets in on it, with bones that hum Dvorak and Rodger and Hart at the worst possible times. Funny. Melancholy. True. And the social critique lands because it is rooted in power, in class, in the everyday brutality of work that turns people into obedient machines.
A small flaw: the novel means to be unruly, but it can get shaggy and a few transitions feel like you blinked and woke up in a different dream. I did not mind. The strangeness is the point, and this book delivers.
One weird thing. There is so much coffee talk that by the end I wanted a mug and a nap.

[megreen00 · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent, grimly funny novel about what happens when a man finally sees the monster he helped build.
Cincinnatus Stillman Fuller is a billionaire banker who melts down in a meeting, suddenly seeing his senior executives as sleek, overfed zombies and the bank itself as a kind of infernal machine. He runs—literally—reinventing himself as a janitor and driving off to a strange little upstate New York town that might be salvation, might be purgatory. The book spends some time early on with his family history and the legacy of the Fuller bank, so his flight from that dynasty feels both inevitable and a little tragic.
Fuller is ridiculous and compelling in equal measure. He is obscenely privileged, self-pitying, and yet clearly broken by grief and by the psychic weight of being the face of a system that devours ordinary people. The novel keeps nudging you to ask whether he’s being haunted by capitalism or by his own guilty brain: zombies in bespoke suits, towering “bank gods,” a looming Nixon specter, cops who think he’s stolen a fortune, Time covers, and a therapist who tries to drag him back to earth. That tension—between genuine mental illness and a world that is actually that grotesque—gives the book its charge.
Clemenceau’s prose is gorgeous and strange. Cities are rendered as deserts of concrete and ash; motels are the color of faded money; small towns are mapped by banks, churches, and insurance offices, like a quiet theology of debt. The tone is bleak, but the humor is sharp and weird enough to keep the whole thing from collapsing under its own darkness. This is very much literary satire with streaks of magical realism and horror stitched through it, and he mostly nails that blend.
The pacing wobbles here and there. Some of the chase-and-therapy material near the end feels a bit crowded compared to the eerie, slower early chapters. But even when the plot gets busy, the voice and the imagery stay strong, and I kept wanting to see what increasingly unhinged vision of capitalism he’d serve up next.
One weird thing: everyone is forever drinking terrible coffee and eating great pie, which feels exactly right for a book about American banking.

[Grady · Rating 5 out of 5]

Chandelier-busting hilarious – and insightful!

California author Gary Clemenceau is, according to his website, ‘an authorist and humorist, novelist and bookist, geek-anomalist and truthsifterist, stay-at-home-dad and TARDIS minivan captive and mystic run-on-sentence hermetic un-hermeticist, caught somewhere between Christmas and the business end of a surly unicorn.’ And after reading and guffawing through this book, that description seems right on! His five novels are THE TAO OF DA-DA, Dracula’s a BUMMER, Man, THE BIG BOOK OF THE, THE TORPOMETRONOMICAN, and BANKER’S HOLIDAY.

Clemenceau’s irresistible and inimitable wit ascends as this novel opens; ‘I am the son of nudist bankers. I grew up in banks. My parents were managers of competing banks. This set the stage for some seriously dull one-act arguments showcasing the mind-numbing tumult of opposing banking procedures; tirades on the most effective way to market financial instruments to a world ignorant of the Prime Asset Preservation Fund; rails against the Central Bank; hosannas to the Central Bank. Bite me, FDIC. But said arguments took on a stunting surrealism when the revolving plaintiff/defendant roles my parents played were performed buck-naked on the bleak green shag of the ’70s…’ Where that prelude leads is distilled well: ‘Cincinnatus Stillman Fuller is a billionaire financier who suffers a breakdown in the middle of a Monday morning staff meeting. Fuller comes to the sudden, disturbing realization that his "brooding, luxurious zombies, otherwise known as senior management" have become just that, and that he must either escape, or become one of them. Fuller flees the discorporate horror, disguises himself as a janitor, and heads crosscountry in an old pick-up to an odd Shangri-la in Upstate NY. But will he escape the bizarre phantasms that continue to dog him? And can anyone dispel a thousand-foot Nixon?’ This is most definitely a first class hard-to-put-down little masterwork of absurdist fiction!

[Inkblot · Rating 4 out of 5]

Banker's Holiday is a strange, darkly funny mid-life crisis for both one man and late-stage capitalism, wrapped up in a corporate ghost story.
We follow Cincinnatus Stillman Fuller, a billionaire banker who has a very public unraveling in the middle of a Monday staff meeting and suddenly sees his senior executives as “brooding, luxurious zombies.” Instead of doubling down on the grind, he bolts—posing as a janitor, climbing into a beat-up pickup and driving toward a kind of makeshift utopia in the northeast. Along the way he’s stalked by hallucinations, corporate nightmares and, yes, a truly unforgettable thousand-foot Nixon.
What I loved most is that you don’t actually need to care about finance to fall into this. The book is really about burnout, self-loathing, and the terrifying moment you realise the life you built is eating you alive. Clemenceau’s prose is vivid and weird in the best way—equal parts satire and fever dream—and there are sections that feel genuinely arresting, you know? I laughed more than I expected, but there’s also this underlying sadness that makes Cincinnatus oddly sympathetic, even when he’s being ridiculous. Yep, I did not expect to feel this much for a billionaire.
That said, this isn’t the kind of satire you half-read in a noisy waiting room. The narrative leans hard into surreal set pieces and interior monologue, and there were moments where I felt a little unmoored from the plot. Sigh. A few stretches of corporate or hallucinatory riffing went on just a bit too long for me, and I can imagine some readers bouncing off the strangeness entirely. Haha, maybe that’s on me for expecting something more straightforward from a book that literally weaponises a giant Nixon. Lol.
Overall, though, I’m grateful I stuck with it. Banker's Holiday is clever, oddly moving, and much more human than its premise suggests. If you’re in the mood for something ambitious, strange, and unexpectedly heartfelt, this is absolutely worth the trip.

[CathyT · Rating 5 out of 5]

Banker’s Holiday is one of those novels that made me pause, take a breath, and ask myself what exactly we are doing to ourselves in the name of work. Cincinnatus Stillman Fuller is a billionaire banker who finally cracks in the middle of a Monday meeting, looks around at his “brooding, luxurious zombies” of senior management, and runs—first from the boardroom, then from the entire life that made him. The book starts with his family and the bank he inherits, then follows him as he drives toward a strange upstate refuge while haunted by corporate phantoms, including a towering Nixon that feels exactly like anxiety given a face.
I felt that Clemenceau captures the texture of burnout and dissociation in a way that’s darkly funny and uncomfortably real. I liked that the prose leans into surrealism without losing sight of Cincinnatus’s humanity; his flight isn’t just a quirky road trip, it’s a desperate attempt to remember who he is outside balance sheets and quarterly reports. The therapy-adjacent moments, the obsessive inner monologue, and the bleak little jokes about money and worth all resonated with my own experiences of mental overload in high-pressure spaces.
This isn’t a queer coming-of-age story or a YA novel about identity, but I still appreciated how it names the violence of systems that demand obedience over authenticity. The novel asks what it costs to opt out, and what might be waiting on the other side of that choice.
Banker’s Holiday won’t work for every reader—the voice is dense and unapologetically weird—but for me, it was a sharp, oddly hopeful reminder that walking away from dehumanising institutions can be an act of survival.

[Ray · Rating 5 out of 5]

Banker’s Holiday is a novel written by Gary Clemenceau. It is about Cincinnatus Stillman Fuller, a billionaire banker, who, in a sense, has a breakdown at work. It starts off with him quite literally realising that he is surrounded by… zombies. But are they really zombies, you wonder while you read? I kept going back and forth! It is interesting because it started off with me thinking that they really are dumb old zombies who don’t even realise that their coworker is a human. I guess it’s because of the way he describes them and their character. The relation is uncanny. Anyways, I know they are not real.

Moving on, Cincinnatus realises that he doesn’t want to be there anymore, and he walks away. He decides to disguise himself as a janitor and go elsewhere.

Of course, without going into too much detail regarding the plot, you do have to realise that this is a different type of story altogether. You go in expecting something, but leave thinking of things in a more metaphorical sense. Also, there are a lot of sub-ideas about the corporate world. I think it would be easily relatable to those going through some sort of funk at work. I also think they might particularly enjoy this (maybe a bit too much).

Long story short, this is a very unique take on a book. You might need to take your time with this one. It can be weird at first, but that’s where it gets most of its charm. (There is also a lot of wordplay, too!).

[Tanata · Rating 5 out of 5]

I did not expect to have feelings about a billionaire banker having a Monday morning meltdown, but here we are. Banker’s Holiday drops Cincinnatus Stillman Fuller into a staff meeting, has him look at senior management and go yep, those are zombies, and then lets him sprint straight into a very specific kind of corporate hell fantasy where spreadsheets are basically a haunting.
The plot is equal parts escape story and fever dream. Fuller bails, disguises himself as a janitor, and barrels off in an old truck toward Haughland, which is pitched like an offbeat refuge but keeps getting invaded by phantasms anyway. And yes, a giant Nixon shows up. A massive, chatty, impossible Nixon. If that sentence made you smile, you are already halfway sold.
What I liked, embarrassingly a lot, is how the book is vicious and funny but also weirdly human about burnout. It skewers that suit guy entitlement, the whole boys club worship of power, the way men are allowed to become monsters and call it leadership, and then asks what it costs to stay a person inside the machine. Not preachy. Just sharp.
Listen, if you have ever stared at an office calendar and felt your soul try to leave your body, read this. Then come back and tell me you did not want to set a boardroom on fire. (Metaphorically. Mostly.)

[Rajnish Kumar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Being an exploratory reader, I love venturing into new territory. Books, like others, offer a variety of unappetizing flavours. Banker’s Holiday is a quirky and imaginative story about Cincinnatus Fuller, a wealthy banker who suddenly feels trapped in his corporate world.
In a moment of sudden panic and gloom, he abandons everything and begins an unfamiliar, dreamlike journey. This marks the beginning of the story, which is filled with odd characters and unexpected adventures. The book is a rich combination of humour, mystery, and surreal moments to illustrate how easily one can lose oneself in work and how crucial it is to step back and rediscover what truly matters.
Even if you know nothing about banking or finance, this book is easy to enjoy because it focuses on people, not numbers. This read helps in the exploration of stress, identity, and the true meaning in a fun and unusual way. If you’ve ever felt burned out or stuck in routine, this story offers a refreshing reminder that starting over is possible—and sometimes necessary.

[Pegboard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gary Clemenceau delights us with his satire fiction, Banker’s Holiday: A Novel of Fiscal Irregularity. You don’t have to be a banker to appreciate the main character’s absurd depiction of his life. Cincinnatus Fuller, an accomplished banker who becomes acutely aware of the emptiness and constraints of his corporate environment, decides to drop it all and begin anew. So, prepare for an unfiltered narrative that will leave you laughing, bewildered, and amazed at his adventure.

I found Banker’s Holiday: A Novel of Fiscal Irregularity an out-of-the-box read, as Gary Clemenceau creates chaos with his main character when he questions society's fundamental values. Though few people in life get the chance to stop the world and reinvent their lives, Cincinnatus Fuller does. By questioning what he has been taught, he could choose paths that lead to unknown destinies. I found this novel entertaining, yet it led me to question some of my own beliefs that were handed down without reason. I got the audiobook read by Boyd Barrett, which was phenomenal.

[Roxier · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lush, bleak, and funny in the way a bad dream can grin at you.
Fuller, billionaire financier, snaps in a Monday meeting when the corporate mask slips and his colleagues become something else entirely. He bolts, hides in plain sight as a janitor, and drives an old truck toward a snowy Upstate refuge where the air feels scrubbed clean and still somehow contaminated.
This book runs on atmosphere. Fluorescent boardrooms turn into tomb bright corridors. Snowdrifts and small town streets carry a hush that makes every footstep sound like an accusation. The surreal intrusions are pitch perfect, especially when a gigantic Nixon steps into the landscape and addresses Fuller like they have unfinished business. Dread, yes, but also a wicked tenderness for the trapped and the numbed.
The voice is barbed and oddly lyrical, and the satire lands hard. A few passages blur into manic riffing and the intensity can spike without warning, but the overall spell holds. By the end I felt grimy and awake, which seems like the point.

[Julie Barrett · Rating 5 out of 5]

Banker's Holiday: A Novel of Fiscal Irregularity by Gary Clemenceau
Like how this one starts out where you learn all about the family and how they died and how the son takes over the bank. So technically advanced with transportation but things come to a head soon as he just can't handle the everyday of things. Love the layout of his house, museum and even the outside area. Strange things are happening with zombies and you don't know if he's just dreaming all this or it's really out there happening to him.
He learns in his adventures that cops are after him for stealing a lot of money from the company...He even made front page of Time magazine. Still getting zombie sightings and confrontations in his mind...
Therapy and others helping him out of his slump brings him to .....
Never saw it coming with everything that was going on.

[Valery · Rating 5 out of 5]

Banker’s Holiday starts with Cincinnatus Stillman Fuller; a billionaire banker who cracks mid-meeting and suddenly sees his boardroom full of silk-suited zombies. He ditches it all, swaps into a janitor’s uniform, and drives off chasing some version of freedom. What follows is part fever dream, part road trip, and for the most part, corporate exorcism. Gary Clemenceau writes with dark humor and sharp insight, showing how power really warps people until they can’t tell real life from hallucination. It’s weird, funny, and kind of moving. The side characters come alive, the satire hits hard, and the whole thing reads like a nightmare you don’t want to wake from. Highly recommend for a crazy yet memorable book.

[Julia B. · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book started out very intriguing and fun before catapulting into abstract absurdity that far outstayed its welcome. I listened to it on audiobook, and the performer did a great job, but nonetheless it was difficult to pay attention to. Reminded me of a grown-up version of A Wrinkle in Time, which I couldn’t stand either.

The writing style was competent and unique, and I was extremely hopeful at the outset when it seemed like the book might be akin to Dante’s Inferno in a hyper capitalist dystopia (the car was named Virgil, for gosh sake), but…the long midway point in Holland was an absolute flop. I can’t stand professor characters who flat out state all the themes of a novel, and throughout the whole thing, women are written in a manner I can only describe as unforgivable.

[Lily · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you like odd, funny, fantastical horror, that at times chilling and at other laugh-out-loud absurd, then you need to read this. Especially if you’re tired of the dystopian way our world has headed, and want to find a way to see the ridiculous in the dark. Fuller is an interesting MC, and you’ll quickly get wrapped up in his story, and journey. At times, it feels like he’s actually two people squeezed into one body. Before you know it, you’ve reached the final page, and left with an odd sense of the surreal lingering with you. If nothing else, this will instill in you the need for work/life balance, lest you, too, become a corporate drone (zombie). Definitely recommend!

[Greig · Rating 2 out of 5]

I enjoyed the playful prose at first, but a novel needs more than just that to keep me interested. An actual story develops in the second part before everything is turned upside down, and I was left wondering what if anything was real, and so I lost interest in what might happen to the character. The ending really dragged. I almost gave up but forced myself to read to the end. Some readers seem to think the whole thing was very clever, but the supposed insights it reveals into a billionaire having a mental breakdown and on society did not seem relevatory and were handled pretty heavy handedly, imo. Overall, very disappointing.

[Rose · Rating 4 out of 5]

What happens when your management team becomes zombies? Stillman Fuller must come to terms with these creatures as he tries to escape the financial breakdown of his bank. This book was at times humorous, and at other times, a bit horrific. It takes a look at our financial system, our reliance on capitalism, and puts a strange, otherworldly twist on it.
I wasn't sure what to expect from this book, but did laugh at times. I did enjoy the narration done for the audiobook, and the narrator kept my interest.
Vrey different.

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really don’t know how to go about reviewing this novel. There is so much I did like about it. Yet, I had to force myself to pick it up each day and came very close to DNF’ing early.

Yet, as much as I struggled with the abstract nature of this book, I did find myself admiring the writing (as opposed to the plotting) and laughed out loud at several parts.

I am surprised it is rated so highly on Goodreads, not because I dont understand people loving it, but I would assume this book would be more divisive.

Anyway, if you like satire and really strong writing g, give it a whirl.

[Fresno Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

Clemenceau is my new favorite writer. His voice is totally unique, and... he just tells it like it is, in a funny, mostly clean non-agenda way. So many books have little bits and pieces of other people's agenda in them, esp. those books touted in The Times. Banker's Holiday is like a literary sorbet for postmodern culture. Incredible work. My highest recommendation.

[Matthew Trearty · Rating 2 out of 5]

Funny in places, absurd in others, and downright ridiculous for most of the time. This book was not my cup of tea. I don't know what else to say... the writing used so many literary devices in a crude way that I felt damaged the story, whatever the story was. Imagine Fear and Loathing but worse; a perplexing fever dream of a novel

[John Payton · Rating 2 out of 5]

There’s a decent concept here with corruption and financial manipulation, and I can see what the book is aiming for.

But the execution feels messy. Too many explanations, too many side details, and not enough emotional or narrative drive to balance it out.

It has moments where it feels clever, but they’re too scattered to fully enjoy.

[Paul Marcos · Rating 1 out of 5]

What a load of crap this book is. I'm pissed that I wasted an Audible credit on it. DNF after the first 1/3 of this. I was looking for something humorous and lighthearted and this was NOT that. It was just stupid.

[Hector Bell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Easy to get through and filled with a few helpful reminders.

[Kiah Fehino · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the best fiction books I've read in a long time. The characters felt real, the story kept me hooked, and I couldn't wait to see what happened next. Definitely a memorable read.

[Liz · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really funny book that brings back so many memories. Cleverly written like nothing I have read before. Like the pictures too.