What's the Name of That Book??? discussion
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Leapfrog with unicorns
SOLVED: Adult Fiction
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SOLVED. Weird Tom Robbins-esque novel about Native Americans, pharmaceutical companies and Central American politics. [s]
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Mia
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May 10, 2013 08:46AM
This is a novel I'm convinced no one else has ever read or heard of but I'm going to try anyway. I found it at a book exchange at a guest house in Cambodia. The protagonist is a half-Native American woman who wears her hair in two long braids and becomes some kind of corpoarte hot-shot and turns out not to be Native American after all. The plot involves some mystery surrounding a pharmaceutical company and its involvement in an unnamed (I think) Central American country (or maybe it's Nicaragua?). It has something to do with patenting a particular kind of corn that I think may have some kind of truly amazing medicinal property (not sure about this) but in any case is highly coveted and basically all of these goings-on lead to armed conflict in said country. It's a Tom Robbins wanna-be novel and not very good at all and has a weird, long, silly title. Anyone?
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i am fairly convinced i will *never* find out the name of this book...but...here's hoping!
thanks, but no. i am fairly sure it's a very obcure author, possibly with no other books and possibly with no books on goodreads. but of course i could be wrong...
When did you read this book? And was it in English, by the way?
yes, it was in english. i thought for some reason the author was aussie or british, but then it was about americans so that seemed unlikely. i read it in 2009.
actually, i'm sure it's still bouncing around the backpacker book trade circuit in cambodia or thereabouts, so maybe i should be posting on some traveler message board there or something!
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Yes! Do you have any ideas?
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i fear i will never find out.
I haven't read it (neither Tom Robbins) so it may not be very valid suggestion, but how about Greenfinger?
Here are a couple possibilities, but these are long shots:Ao Toa: Earth Warriors
The Seeds of Misrule by P G Morgan I couldn't find this one on Goodreads but here is a link where you can see the (totally weird) cover: https://sslbf.servers121.com/~paulmr0...
One of these is from New Zealand and the other is Australian by the way.
sadly, neither of those is it. it had a long, complicated title, i think. i can even picture the cover! so frustrating. ah well. thanks for trying!
A Cure to Die For: A Medical Thriller maybe?The book you're after sounds like a bad cross between the windup girl and the da vinci code... and so does this one.
What does the cover look like? Leapfrog With Unicorns looks to have the Corn and Corporations subjects and a heroine with plaited hair (http://www.trademe.co.nz/books/fictio...), but the title is not very long...
oh my god, ayshe! found it! no, the title is not long, but it's weird and tom robbins-esque, which was the overall impression it left on my mind. plus as soon as i saw the author's name i recognized it.how did you do that?! i swear, i searched and searched last year and came up empty.
behold, the power of crowdsourcing.
thank you so much!
and yes, it was nicaragua. here is a page with the full description. https://listselltrade.co.nz/item_item...
You can see why I found him Robbins-esque: "Peter Hawes, Leapfrog with Unicorns (Vintage Press, NZ) and Tasman's Lay (Hazard Press, NZ). Two from the unsung hero, cult figure and probably only member of the absurdist movement in New Zealand, who writes with great energy, wit and surprising discipline about almost anything that takes his fancy. It's not much of a secret that Peter is also W.P. Hearst who has written the not-to-be-missed Inca Girls Aren't Easy (Vintage), a series of joyous, sad and slippery tales."
:) Cool, one more happy reunion! It was in the search results for subject corn on http://www.worldcat.org/advancedsearch and then I googled about it, but there's not much info around.
Still can't find an image of the cover of the paperback version I read, but did find more interesting stuff. From http://nzbooks.org.nz/1999/literature...So it is with Peter Hawes, who has produced his fourth novel, (leaving aside his first, La Hoguera, as the reviewer – no habla español – must). When he produced his first novel in English, Tasman’s Lay, in 1995, Hawes was (as perhaps he still is) better known as a writer for screen and stage, a newspaper columnist, a children’s author, a dabbler in poetry and short fiction and, of course, a television funny man. This novel was received with bemusement. It was everything everyone expected it to be coming from Hawes – “witty”, “erudite”, “rollicking”, “picaresque” and “a highly inventive comic diversion” – but it was also disconcertingly more. For one thing, Hawes seemed to have put a lot of work into the research, even if it was only to know his futtocks from his strakes; and, for another, it had a bleak ending and spoke just a few too many true words in jest. There was a sense that the author had ambitions of a higher order than his reviewers were giving him credit for. Was this comedy marred by intrusive “issues”, or was this a serious book swamped by compulsive clowning?
Two further novels followed – Leapfrog with Unicorns (1996) and Playing Waterloo (1998); both were very funny, but both were also highly complex and had things to say, about global capitalism (Unicorns) and history (Waterloo). Like Tasman’s Lay, they were executed with the impressive assurance of a billowing imagination ballasted with painstaking research. Each was more exuberant and less satisfying than Tasman, suffering in both cases from excessive complexity and, stylistically, a mixture that was just a little too rich. Neither convinced his readership that Hawes deserved – or even wanted – to be taken seriously.
Lol, there you go. When I left NZ, Peter Hawes was still an actor. I did a total double take at the author name!
What's the Name of That Book???
Books mentioned in this topic
Leapfrog with unicorns (other topics)A Cure to Die For (other topics)
Ao Toa: Earth Warriors (other topics)
Greenfinger (other topics)
