book review: Holiday in a Coma by Frederic Beigbeder

"Slowly but surely, five o'clock has reluctantly come round.
Boredom breaks on the horizon with its disappointed yawns. It is the emollient hour, the hour of turpitude. Couples and livers have been serenely self-destructing; now it is time to put on a brave face. At 5 a.m. all that remains in a nightclub are the apoplectic losers and in dolent idiots who know that whater may happen, they have little chance og getting anything up."

If ever a novel came with a beats per minute register it would be this one. Not just because the action is set in a night club but because of the pace.

Things start slowly introducing the reader to the world of Mar Marronier, an advertising executive, who knows all the best people and is invited to all the best parties. Tonight he is going to meet an old friend who has gone to Japan and made it big as an international DJ at the opening of a new club in Paris.

Hour by hour you follow Marc through the experience of attending the opening at the club Shit and of his antics. The pace speeds and slows depending on alacholic intake of Marc and the manic behaviour of his drug fuelled friends.

But what strikes you from quite early on is that this is a shallow world where name dropping, drug taking and putting on an exhibition are all key to making a name for yourself. Being original and a thinker is only good if you can use that in a public way to court attention and followers.

Marc, who steers clear of drugs most of the time, gets drunker and displays the classic signs of boredom. Irratable and increasingly tired he manages to offend ex girlefriends, friends and strangers as he wanders from bar stool to dance floor with the odd break outside to breathe in the atmosphere of an early Parisian morning.

Just as you start to despair that Marc is as shallow as the rest his wife emerges from under the human wreckage of the dance floor to illustrate the what really matters is a real love that most of the others in Shit are desperately struggling and failing to find.

For a story that can make you laugh as well as despair it's one that sums up perfectly the shallow celebrity obsessed age that most of us are trapped in.

Thoughts at the half way point of Holiday in a Coma

Having waded through Gide, which has a very pre-war turn of the last century feel about it, the reading choice has switched to something a lot more contemporary. Holiday in a Coma by Federic Beigbeder is as far away from Gide's world of meetings over tea in the drawing room as you could get. But the sense of fraud, facades and failed love that pervades The Counterfeiters is just as evident here.

The first novel in this two-book volume, follows Marc Marronier, a rich, trendy and well connected advertising executive who has been invited to the opening of the must-go-to openning of a new nightclub in Paris. His old friend is behind the opening of Shit and so he heads off to renew that relationship and to rub shoulders with the glitterati.

The book runs at 100 miles an hour with the images, verbal assuaslts launched by Marc and his friends all speeding up as the music and the drugs kick in. But rather than feel blinded by the names and superstar status of those around him Marc instead becomes morose and starts to amuse himself in ways that alienate him even further from those around him.

Good stuff and looking forward to the ending...