Louse

De: David Grand

Narrado por: Ken Kliban

What if Howard Hughes ruled his corporate empire from a chrome-and-glass citadel, served by problem gamblers who've been enslaved so they can pay off their debts? Louse is only partly the answer to that question. It's also a deft piece of corporate satire, an Orwellian fable about absolute power, even a kind of religious allegory.

Author David Grand's remarkable first novel follows Herman Q. Louse, valet to the invalid, germ-phobic billionaire Herbert Horatio Blackwell, as he navigates the conspiracy-ridden world Blackwell has constructed in the middle of the Nevada desert. Louse's story is interspersed with snippets of memos, bulletins, press releases, and public confessions - Grand's modern version of groupthink - all of which provide a darkly comic counterpoint to the novel's growing intrigue.

There are more twists and turns in this book than in your average Hollywood thriller, yet somehow the plot - as well-oiled as it is - becomes hardly the point. Louse is a chilling look at the fate of the individual in a collectivized world, as appropriate to today's corporate drones as to the denizens of Orwell's 1984.

©1998, 2011 David Grand (P)2012 Audible, Inc.

I really wanted to like this

I can't think of a good reason why, but it took me 3 tries to even get past the 1st hour... I kept realizing I had completely tuned out and had no idea what was going on. Then I gave it a full 4 hours of dedicated listening, and I just could not get into it. It's not that it's poorly written or anything, I feel bad even leaving this review, but something about it left me able to abandon it after 4 hours and not even be slightly curious what happens to the characters, I just couldn't get into it. Maybe it's me? Maybe I'm in a crabby mood? But I've been binging other books and been perfectly content. I mean, I don't base your entire decision on my review, maybe I don't know what I'm talking about. I'm really bad at breakups.