Lord of the Barnyard: Killing the Fatted Calf and Arming the Aware in the Corn Belt: Amazon.de: Tristan Egolf: Englische Bücher

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Tristan Egolf's first novel is an unsparing view of life in a town where inbred Appalachia and Middle America overlap and intermingle. John Kaltenbrunner, an only child, is born on the heels of his father's death. At an unusually early age, the boy shows a flair for farming and a desire to be left alone, two things that make people pick on him in increasingly vicious ways. John's life plan is to drop out of school when he hits 16 and mind his own business. But he loses everything, alienates everyone, and through a series of increasingly outrageous mishaps winds up serving three years work-release felony time on a river barge. When he comes home to Baker, no one recognizes him:

John had expected, maybe even hoped for, a little something more to herald his arrival--some burning crosses or lynch mobs on the lawn, a coven of Methodists to picket his re-entry, a banner-wielding committee from the school board, anything at all. But to his disbelief, he found the streets quiet and empty.

The streets don't stay that way for long as the tale truly turns on the garbage strike organized by John and his gang of fellow misfits. As a result, Baker comes apart at the seams and all the citizenry reveal their true natures. In his singular debut, Tristan Egolf demonstrates an unschooled flair for storytelling, which earned him accolades--and even a comparison to Céline--when the novel was published in France. True, his characters are cutouts with few surprises, including dialogue (there isn't any). But there is plenty of room in these pages to admire a wild and imaginative look at a slice of life cut from the underbelly of Middle America. --Schuyler Engle

From Kirkus Reviews

The contrary spirits of Sinclair Lewis and Thomas Pynchon, as well as of John Kennedy Toole, hover over this unruly first novel: a satirical mock-epic of Middle America and, at least in part, a boldly imagined allegory of the struggles of American labor. The storys told by an admiring ``disciple'' of John Kaltenbrunner, a farm boy who grows up fatherless and friendless in the town of Baker (where, years before, Kaltenbrunner pre had discovered prehistoric remainsa fact that eventually, and surprisingly, figures in the novel's action). Beginning with a sly Prologue in which his protagonist's birth is ``explained'' in a manner reminiscent of frontier tall-tales, Egolf contrives a deliriously overheated story of an introverted and stubborn outcast whose mistreatment by disapproving neighbors transforms him into a militant workers'-rights advocate. Egolf writes knowledgeably, at times lyrically, of the exhausting monotony and compensatory satisfactions of hard manual labor, while simultaneously exhausting the reader with over-the-top accounts of Kaltenbrunner's pitched battles with Baker's smugly complacent vested interests. The climax occurs when Our Hero, having been driven from his home, returns as a trash collector and not long afterward organizes his fellow workers for the final conflictwhich ends in a cemetery. The wonderfully named Lord of the Barnyard achieved US publication in a roundabout way, its globetrotting young author having been''discovered and sponsored by French writer Patrick Modiano. The novel appeared first in England, but for all its narrative energy and impressive knowledge of the workaday world, Egolfs debut isn't the overlooked masterpiece some are calling it: Egolf too frequently fails to dramatize, indulging instead in lengthy (and, to be fair, frequently hilarious) summary jeremiads. And, thank heaven, his book is much more than an imitation of the overrated Confederacy of Dunces. Egolf has a real subject and the ability and will to write about it passionately. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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Faulkner, Toole rolling in graves with comparisons to Egolf 30. Juli 2000

Von Ben Duchek

Format:Taschenbuch

A poor man's Confederacy of Dunces? You bet. Catcher in the Rye on acid? Yeah. A great book? Aye, there's the rub.

And the final answer is unfortunately, no. What starts off as a comic farce a three-point throw away from those pillars of literature -- a book that looks like it will be Faulkneresque in its portrayal of downtrodden America -- ends up giving birth to childs of farce, ugliness, and bad writing, squeezing out the beautiful miss comic. Potential becomes reality, and the reality of Lord of the Barnyard becomes pathetic.

It becomes quite tedious indeed to read about the protagonist Kaltenbrunner's continuous nature of suffering; not that there is anything wrong with that, of course, but only because Egolf uses the same descriptive flourishes to describe it. By about page 300, the book's overwrought and overused expressions make the novel downright unreadable.

The great Spencer Tracy once said, "Never let 'em catch you acting," and unfortunately, Egolf applies not this advice to his field, flashing us several times with the nakedness of his storywriting. And it isn't pretty.

Perhaps only because the 400 plus page tome is bald of any dialogue, the writing itself is the sole focus, and Egolf sways into extremely hackneyed prose and constant literary cliches. Some of the author's most frequent phrases, "Baker Lay" or "felling giants" sound like something that would come from a whiny 14 year old kid in his first creative writing class. This malady of utilizing vague cliches also could be called by its more frequently used name -- bad writing. And Barnyard flatlines.

Still, I have to give the author some props for writing a first novel with such brash and vigorous sensibilities. Ironically, Lord of the Barnyard -- a book about a trailer trash town named Baker -- has some class, and the brilliant premise itself makes the end result all the more maddening. That is, it just ain't very good.

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Faulkner, Toole, rolling in graves with comparisons to Egolf 23. Juli 2000

Von Ben Duchek

Format:Taschenbuch

A poor man's Confederacy of Dunces? You bet. Catcher in the Rye on acid? Yeah. A great book? Aye, there's the rub.

And the final answer is -- unfortunately, no. What starts off as a comic farce a three-point throw away from those pillars of literature -- a book that looks like it will be Faulkneresque in its portrayal of downtrodden America -- ends up giving birth to childs of farce, ugliness, and bad writing, squeezing out the beautiful miss comic. Potential becomes reality, and the reality of Lord of the Barnyard becomes pathetic.

It becomes quite tedious indeed to read about the book protagonist Kaltenbrunner's continuous nature of suffering; not that there is anything wrong with that, of course, but only because Egolf uses the same descriptive flourishes to describe it.

Perhaps only because the 400 plus page tome is bald of any dialogue, the writing itself is the sole focus, and Egolf sways into extremely young prose and constant literary cliches. Some of the author's most frequent phrases, "Baker Lay" or "felling giants" sound like something that would come from a whiny 14 year old kid in his first creative writing class. This malady of utilizing vague cliches also could be called by its more frequently used name -- bad writing.

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What exactly is a troll? 2. Juni 2000

Von Bradford A. Dolben

Format:Taschenbuch

I was first drawn to this book based on its cover. I could find nothing in there to really describe what the story or morals of it were, but I still had to get it. I am so glad that I did, because there are so many aspects to it that I loved, the brutally descriptive prose, the side stories, and of course the plot itself. I have often felt like an outcast, but John has me (and everyone else on earth) beat. From his days of being cruelly beaten in school, to his final hurrah, he was a constant victim of bad luck. I read another review of this saying that if you're not from the mid-west, then it's not for you, well that's not true at all. If you've ever felt that your luck is the worst, and everyone else is out to get you, then this is your book.

The troll comment will make more sense when you read the book.

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