A Hologram for the King

By: Dave Eggers

Narrated by: Dion Graham

Length: 7 hrs and 52 mins

Publisher's summary

In a rising Saudi Arabian city, far from weary, recession-scarred America, a struggling businessman pursues a last-ditch attempt to stave off foreclosure, pay his daughter’s college tuition, and finally do something great. In A Hologram for the King, Dave Eggers takes us around the world to show how one man fights to hold himself and his splintering family together in the face of the global economy’s gale-force winds.

This taut, richly layered, and elegiac novel is a powerful evocation of our contemporary moment - and a moving story of how we got here.

©2012 Dave Eggers (P)2012 Recorded Books

The price paid for capitalism

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

Yes. The effects of capitalism across 3 generations is a great story.

What did you like best about this story?

Many people can relate to dreams falling short and temptations that should be avoided.

What about Dion Graham’s performance did you like?

His presentation is honest and earnest, strait forward. I like the way he represents men and women in his auditory style.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

Yes!

Any additional comments?

I kept thinking back to my Dad, his career in metallurgy, and the way he was against America's economy being service based versus manufacturing based.

A reflective story written simply and elegantly

Eggers delivers once again. Not as funny as his previous works. This story shows an older, more mature side of Eggers, provoking great questions and ideas. A really lovely piece of work. The main character still occasionally haunts my thoughts.

Dave Egg delivers

A Hologram for the King is a solid book, maybe Dave Egger’s best piece of pure fiction. The plot is a bit understated, a guy goes to the Middle East to prepare a presentation for a king that doesn’t seem to ever want to show up. From there he meanders around the Middle East, meeting people and trying to find himself. It’s a soul searching novel about disconnection and a loss of self. It’s not a depressing book but it portrays a character who’s confused and vulnerable. Good stuff!

Quite a bizarre tale of monotonous triviality.

What are we working for?
What are we achieving?
Is it all for naught?

Likely.

Relationships matter. Little else does.

Everything else is just a hologram. Here one minute, so real as if you can reach out and touch it. Just another of life's near misses the next minute.

Love Eggars. Not my favorite of his works though.

I think I get it, just wasn't that into it.

Grippingly mundane.

A Ballad for the Twilight of the American Empire

Would you listen to A Hologram for the King again? Why?

This is one of the best audiobooks I have listened to in a long time. Dion Graham, the narrator, manages a tone that is paradoxically grim yet with bouts of hope and, even more surprising, romance. He is the main character. He is not just reading his sad ballad.

What did you like best about this story?

The story was taut, episodic with fascinating and unexpected detours. The story moves well. This could make a great movie with little need for tinkering.

If you were to make a film of this book, what would be the tag line be?

When you think that you have lost everything, you sometimes discover that you were wrong....

A deeply enjoyable man vs world story

Too many Man vs. World stories rely on characters who lack flaws. Characters who would be perfectly great at everything if the world would stop keeping them down.

Alan, our lead in Hologram, is a deeply flawed man. He is jealous and fearful, watching his life and dreams fade away and out of his grasp.

Alan wants to play by the rules, all the rules, but the rules refuse to stand still. He wants to do the right thing, but the right thing is never clear. He makes good decisions that go bad and bad decisions that work out just fine.

He is a sympathetic man, immanently relatable. This is good, because the story itself, when considered from afar, is quite boring. The journey of an interesting character struggling in an interesting location is enough for Dave Eggers to have a winner.

Great Reader, Great Read

You hear people say, "(blank) novel haunted me." But dig a little deeper, and it's usually some writer's trick of outrageous violence (or some other offense against humanity) at the center of the sentiment. Yet here's a book that's been haunting me for months now, and it didn't contain a single scene of murder, rape or torture to do it.

How? It's a very spare book--an "easy" listen. But each scene is drawn with purpose and originality. I didn't expect to like the setting in Saudi Arabia--but Eggers skips the easy exoticisms and creates a world at once unlike anything I expected, yet totally recognizable.

At the center of it all is a tale of the decline and dissolution of Schwinn Bicycles (yes!). It's a "backstory" item, but Eggers returns to it again and again--the whole book's really a rumination on just what the heck went wrong, and what such failures of modernization/corporatization/globalization/etc. mean for a man trying to survive in the world today, (and so we return to the question of murder, rape and torture...).

Now THAT'S haunting.

All this is accomplished without being preachy, or prescriptive. Just perceptive.

Also, the reader Dion Graham really is superlative--I bought the book on a Salon recommendation that praised his ability to capture in his read the way an Eggers page is "composed" (with eccentric spacing, elisions, etc.). Thought this would make for a sort of avant-garde, "performance art" experience. Not at all--it was like being inside someone else's train-of-thought, but without the claustrophobia. Incredible vocal characterizations. No way I would've gotten as much out of text on a page!

Vivid, thoughtful, moody. Couldn't put it down.

What did you love best about A Hologram for the King?

The narration sweeps you along. You enter a desert setting for a life that hovers on the edge of disappointment, reflecting the downward spiral of western aspiration . . . yet the character's American optimism flickers again. The people are beautifully drawn and you can care about them even as all the answers aren't clear.

Which scene was your favorite?

When the character goes to the mountains with his driver friend, and rides out into the night to help hunt a wolf.

it was interesting.

I was intrigued to hear about a foreigners perspective of my culture. I also didn't expect it to be so short so it surprised me when it ended. I really wanted to know more about happened to Alan and if he ever got what he wanted and what he hoped for.

Willie Loman goes to Saudi Arabia

Any additional comments?

Narrator Dion Graham makes this an enjoyable read, combined with the all-too-human failings of the main character Alan. He has loser and winner characteristics that make him likable. Combine that with the sheer unfamiliarity of Saudi Arabia, deftly portrayed through Alan's reactions and thoughts, and I got something out of the ordinary that I hadn't expected. I tend to listen to books on dog walks, and I can tell you the dog got a lot of exercise in the two days it took me to listen to this. So perhaps it can be said that "I couldn't put it down." I plan on reading more Dave Eggers books as a result.