Freddy and Fredericka

By: Mark Helprin

Narrated by: Robert Ian Mackenzie

Length: 25 hrs and 29 mins

Publisher's summary

Best-selling, critically acclaimed author Mark Helprin's work has drawn favorable comparisons to an elite group of literary legends, including James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Edgar Allan Poe, and Thomas Mann. Helprin's sheer comic brilliance shines in this ingenious farce.

Freddy is the bright but aloof Prince of Wales. Fredericka is his blonde, beautiful, and beloved wife. When they stumble into a public relations nightmare with no easy solution, they must make amends by serving an unusual penance. Literally dropped from a plane into a mysterious place called Hoboken, New Jersey, Freddy and Fredericka are given one task. They must reconquer America!

A thinly veiled satire of what might have happened if Princess Diana had survived, Freddy and Fredericka is an imaginative gem full of clever wordplay and wicked political jabs.

©2005 Mark Helprin (P)2005 Recorded Books, LLC

Critic reviews

"Helprin's entertaining new novel [is] a rollicking picaresque saga that reads as though Evelyn Waugh had put the movies Roman Holiday and Duck Soup into a blender along with some old copies of People magazine and a couple of Mark Twain's travelogues, and seasoned the resulting confection with generous helpings of his own black comedy....Mr. Helprin has constructed a perfect showcase for his heretofore underused gift of humor, and in doing so he has produced a delightful romp of a book." (The New York Times)
"Irresistibly mischievous." (Booklist)
"Wildly imaginative, adventure-filled, clever." (Publishers Weekly)
"[Mark Helprin] frequently astounds with the freshness of voice and the oddly soaring majesty of this...comic call for greatness in a mediocre era." (Kirkus Reviews)

Dangerously amusing

Don't try to eat or drink while listening to this! Wry British humor at its sneaky best. I still can't think of the Konrad Adenauer exchange without chuckling, even though I almost inhaled my ma po tofu lunch and had tears streaming down my face. The accent thing isn't much of a distraction, at least not like it was in "War and Peace" where it was Russians with a cockney accent.

Worth it!

Politically astute, hilarious, and well worth your time and money.

I loved it, mostly!

I really enjoyed this book, much more than I expected to. It was funny, thought provoking, satirical, descriptive and ironic. Why not five stars? The narrator's lack of American accents in the context of his variety of English accents was distracting, and the double entendre names was (were?) overdone.

Please, does anyone know the anagram for live ash circle???????

Marvelous but maddening.

This story might have flowed from the pen of a Cervantes or Rabelais or Gogol had they lived now. It has every right to stand unabashed on the bookshelf between Homer or Tolstoy. It is singularly original in style and reveals to us the truth of ourselves. It is seeped in a timeless wisdom. Plainly the work of a genius.

However, the concatenation of misunderstandings the characters get tangled in become downright infuriating after the first dozen. They are amusing at first. Then they get wearying. At last they fill you with nothing less than a veritable rage. How many times did the author need to needle me with same bloody trick? And how the trick drags each time! Oscar Wilde or Musset may have done the like, but they would’ve done it lightheartedly, so that it’s pleasing. But here the unvarying trick ceaselessly pokes at your nerves, again and again, only with different words or puns. And it irks me so much because otherwise the book could’ve been perfection itself. It gratuitously harms this work of art, as if done by some sort of monstrous compulsion. If only the writer used more restraint and exercised some delicacy of judgment, the result would have been finer. It almost amounts to a sort of moral flaw, truth be told.

Anyways, I do recommend the book because it is the best thing written in decades. It gave me endless pleasure. And if all this sounds contradictory: think of someone you love dearly, but who also annoys you to the very depths.

The wit of the writer

Wit and sarcasm and honesty and truth and insight to politicians both side of the ocean

Can't rate it high enough (and I'm a tough grader)

I admit it, I?m easier on audio books than printed ones because I tend to use them while occupying myself ?doing something else? but I?ve never listened to one twice before. This is fabulous. I highly recommend it for humor, fun and plain old smart stupid wit. It?s a romp and a pun and a mockery of everything dull. As an aside, if you haven?t listened to ?dr. strange and mister norrel? I also recommend that. These are two books I have gone out and bought in print after the audio. That (for me, the cheapest of the cheap) is a rarity.Get it, listen to it, lighten up and enjoy a fairy tale of america.

God save Craig-Vyvyan! I liked it.

It was weird, beautiful, and funny. I listened to much of it hiking alone through the Sierra Nevada, which is strangely appropriate. (Why I might think it strangely appropriate to listen to a comic novel about a mythical Prince and Princess of Wales while hiking through a pristine American forest will only become apparent after reading the book.) I finished it a week ago, and it still hangs on. There were times it seemed overly repetitive, overly long, overly repetitive, and overly long but that is part of what makes it so hypnotic. It feels more like a dream that I've woken from rather than something I've just listened to. Then again, maybe that was the forest. Anyway, Its really worth a try, because however overlong you may find it, it is still beautiful and strange and funny, or so says Mr. Neil (who you may look up if you have a 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica) Yes, now that I think about it, I liked it quite a bit. How often do you get to dream that you are the Prince (or Princess) of Wales? God save Mark Helprin!

Moving with giggles

This is an amazing flight of fancy which entertained me every minute. An impressive accomplishment.

Witty Witty Witty !

Cold not stop laughing!
I would love to know if the people involved read it, and would kill to see their faces!

Wordy, wordy, wordy

What does Robert Ian Mackenzie bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

Very assured and apt narration

Any additional comments?

Fun and funny, except that the author beats many scenes to death by making them go on and on well after the point has been established. It would be zippier and otherwise the same at half the length.