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.
A Hologram for the King
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"Mr. Eggers uses a new, pared down, Hemingwayesque voice to recount his story... he demonstrates in "Hologram" that he is master of this more old-fashioned approach as much as he was a pioneering innovator with "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius."...[This] sad-funny-dreamlike story unfolds to become an allegory about the frustrations of middle-class America, about the woes unemployed workers and sidelined entrepreneurs have experienced in a newly globalized world in which jobs are being outsourced abroad.... A comic but deeply affecting tale about one man's travails that also provides a bright, digital snapshot of our times."
--Michiko Kakutani, "The New York Times"
"A spare but moving elegy for the American century."--"Publishers Weekly"
"Eggers can do fiction as well as he likes."--Carolyn Kellogg, "The Los Angeles Times"
"A potent, well-drawn portrait of one man's discovery of where his personal and professional selves split and connect."--"Kirkus Reviews"
"An extraordinary work of timely and provocative themes...This novel reminds us that above all, Eggers is a writer of books, and a writer of the highest order....An outstanding achievement in Eggers's already impressive career, and an essential read."--Carmela Ciuraru, "The San Francisco Chronicle"
"Eggers understands the pressures of American downward-mobility, and in the protagonist of his novel, Alan Clay, has created an Everyman, a post-modern Willy Loman....The novel operates on a grand and global scale, but it also is intimate."--Elizabeth Taylor, "The Chicago Tribune"
"Fascinating...Although Godot may be "Hologram"'s philosophical source, Eggers is no Beckettian minimalist. The novel is paradoxically suspenseful, but it's also rich in character and in Eggers's evocative writing about place..."A Hologram for the King," as far from home as it might seem, is an acute slice of American life."--Colette Bancroft, "Tampa Bay Times"
"Dave Eggers is a pr
--Michiko Kakutani, "The New York Times"
"A spare but moving elegy for the American century."--"Publishers Weekly"
"Eggers can do fiction as well as he likes."--Carolyn Kellogg, "The Los Angeles Times"
"A potent, well-drawn portrait of one man's discovery of where his personal and professional selves split and connect."--"Kirkus Reviews"
"An extraordinary work of timely and provocative themes...This novel reminds us that above all, Eggers is a writer of books, and a writer of the highest order....An outstanding achievement in Eggers's already impressive career, and an essential read."--Carmela Ciuraru, "The San Francisco Chronicle"
"Eggers understands the pressures of American downward-mobility, and in the protagonist of his novel, Alan Clay, has created an Everyman, a post-modern Willy Loman....The novel operates on a grand and global scale, but it also is intimate."--Elizabeth Taylor, "The Chicago Tribune"
"Fascinating...Although Godot may be "Hologram"'s philosophical source, Eggers is no Beckettian minimalist. The novel is paradoxically suspenseful, but it's also rich in character and in Eggers's evocative writing about place..."A Hologram for the King," as far from home as it might seem, is an acute slice of American life."--Colette Bancroft, "Tampa Bay Times"
"Dave Eggers is a pr
About the Author
Dave Eggers is the bestselling author of seven books including "A Hologram for the King," a finalist for the National Book Award; "Zeitoun," winner of the American Book Award and Dayton Literary Peace Prize; and "What Is the What," which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won France's Prix Medici. In 2002, with Ninive Calegari he cofounded 826 Valencia, a nonprofit writing and tutoring center for youth in the Mission District of San Francisco. Local communities around the country have since opened sister 826 centers. Eggers lives in Northern California with his wife and two children.
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Dave Eggers' "A Hologram for the King" is both an entertaining satire of the at times surreal expatriate experience in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and a deeper meditation on the hollowing out of the American industrial economy.
In fiction, business executives are generally stereotyped as either sinister or feckless. "Hologram's" Alan Clay is of the familiar second type. He is 54, divorced, broke, and having been made serially redundant from well-known companies (notably Schwinn the late bicycle manufacturer) he is striving to eke out an existence as an under-employed consultant. Somehow, on the basis of a tenuous connection to a member of the KSA royal family and his client's ignorance, he lands what is potentially a game changing contract to lead the sales pitch of Reliant (the world's largest IT concern) to the King Abdullah Economic City ("KAEC as in cake") that is being built near Jeddah.
Alan's experience in KSA will be familiar to most western travelers to the Kingdom. He turns up for confirmed meetings only to find that his counterparty is out of the country. He passes a military checkpoint where a close to comatose soldier dangles his feet in an inflatable pool to keep cool; he encounters three dozen south Asian workers dense-packed in a semi finished luxury apartment while one floor above, a Saudi salesman occupies a similar apartment equipped to the highest standard of luxury; he discovers illicit rot-gut liquor; he gets invited to a drunken party at a Nordic embassy, and so on.
Eggers is not especially concerned to ridicule Saudi Arabia, though its absurdities make for easy satire. His main "message" is the passing of America's industrial age.... Read more ›
In fiction, business executives are generally stereotyped as either sinister or feckless. "Hologram's" Alan Clay is of the familiar second type. He is 54, divorced, broke, and having been made serially redundant from well-known companies (notably Schwinn the late bicycle manufacturer) he is striving to eke out an existence as an under-employed consultant. Somehow, on the basis of a tenuous connection to a member of the KSA royal family and his client's ignorance, he lands what is potentially a game changing contract to lead the sales pitch of Reliant (the world's largest IT concern) to the King Abdullah Economic City ("KAEC as in cake") that is being built near Jeddah.
Alan's experience in KSA will be familiar to most western travelers to the Kingdom. He turns up for confirmed meetings only to find that his counterparty is out of the country. He passes a military checkpoint where a close to comatose soldier dangles his feet in an inflatable pool to keep cool; he encounters three dozen south Asian workers dense-packed in a semi finished luxury apartment while one floor above, a Saudi salesman occupies a similar apartment equipped to the highest standard of luxury; he discovers illicit rot-gut liquor; he gets invited to a drunken party at a Nordic embassy, and so on.
Eggers is not especially concerned to ridicule Saudi Arabia, though its absurdities make for easy satire. His main "message" is the passing of America's industrial age.... Read more ›
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
By Sue Kichenside
TOP 500 REVIEWER
Format:Hardcover
Fiftysomething Alan Clay is a low-key kinda guy. He is going through some sort of existential late mid-life crisis but even that is a low-key kinda breakdown. Financially strapped, he is dependent on closing a gazillion dollar deal with King Abdullah in Saudi's new city-in-the-making. But when he eventually arrives at the nascent King Abdullah Economic City, there's no sign of the king and Clay enters a Kafkaesque world where his already shaky grip on things becomes even more precarious.
This loss of grip is reflected in the underlying thrust of the story - the loss of manufacturing in the States and the economic rise of China. Unfortunately, this reader's interest tailed off somewhat for the last third of the book when Eggers digresses from these twin themes to go on a couple of detours but nevertheless this is a terrific read from a terrific writer.
You can see Alan Clay so clearly that it's as if he is standing right in front of you and Dave Eggers portrays the anomalies of life in the Kingdom so well it's as if you are there. Whilst many aspects of what is happening to Clay are really quite sad and touching, this is a very humorous read. Clay's car journeys with his driver Yousef, a wonderfully drawn character, are hilarious. 4.5*
This loss of grip is reflected in the underlying thrust of the story - the loss of manufacturing in the States and the economic rise of China. Unfortunately, this reader's interest tailed off somewhat for the last third of the book when Eggers digresses from these twin themes to go on a couple of detours but nevertheless this is a terrific read from a terrific writer.
You can see Alan Clay so clearly that it's as if he is standing right in front of you and Dave Eggers portrays the anomalies of life in the Kingdom so well it's as if you are there. Whilst many aspects of what is happening to Clay are really quite sad and touching, this is a very humorous read. Clay's car journeys with his driver Yousef, a wonderfully drawn character, are hilarious. 4.5*
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
By NickR
Format:Hardcover
A fine book, wryly humorous, narrated with confidence and restraint. The theme - the emptiness around us, and the importance of being able to identify and grasp the real - is handled at a number of levels, which prevents it becoming as depressing as it might sound. The protagonist, poor Alan Clay, is an homme moyen sensuel who has lost all his points of reference and is adrift in a world he no longer understands.
This is the first book I've read by Dave Eggers, and I'll certainly buy another.
This is the first book I've read by Dave Eggers, and I'll certainly buy another.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Eggers novel reads like a contemporary take on Arthur Miller's famous play, Death of a Salesman. It not only manages to expose the hollowness of a relatively unsuccessful commercial life, but places it in the context of globalisation. The decline of America is juxtaposed with the rise of China. But it is its setting, Saudi Arabia, which suggests that the spread of capitalism consequent on US decline is very thin indeed. Like the new desert city planned by the Saudi king, it confuses aspiration for reality in the business speak which masquerades as the new lingua franca. The novel's message is both highly local and global, individual and societal. As we are all increasingly herded into `competition' with one another, on the basis it will encourage dynamism and success, the results are often the very opposite: mediocrity, lack of sufficient resources, and worst of all, self-deception. This is definitely a novel of its time.
By S. Boden
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
The start to this book did take a while to get into. However, when it did get going it was brilliant. The main character was portrayed brilliantly, however the ending of the book seemed a bit too sharp and vague.
By Poppy Hall
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
I have followed Dave Eggers' writing on and off over the years - I especially enjoyed A Hearbreakig Work - and decided to read this because it's set in Saudi Arabia, a country which I am keen to visit, fictionally. (Reading is a great form of distance tourism: after reading this novel, you won't want to go there in any great hurry). The story's hero is Alan Clay, a struggling American businessman taking a small team to as as-yet-incomplete "new" city in the desert to drum up IT business for his firm. You sense the project is doomed from the start. But you are swiftly drawn into Alan's diminishing, increasingly hopeless world, which is the world of America's loss of prestige in the global business area - brought about by men like Aan, who shipped manufacturing out to China and came to regret it.
Alan's loneliless and lovelessness, his inability to rise to the occasion when two women present themelves on offer, his poignant unposted letters to his daughter Kit, and his friendship with his charming, funny, Westernised driver, all combine to make this story a real page-turner. It's also (no surprise, this being Eggers) wonderfully written.
My only quibble was with the ending, which seemed just a little too abrupt, as though Eggers had lost interest in the project - which is why it's a four-star read for me, and not five. I'd have liked more of a resolution, and a hint of what awaited Alan on his return to the US.
Alan's loneliless and lovelessness, his inability to rise to the occasion when two women present themelves on offer, his poignant unposted letters to his daughter Kit, and his friendship with his charming, funny, Westernised driver, all combine to make this story a real page-turner. It's also (no surprise, this being Eggers) wonderfully written.
My only quibble was with the ending, which seemed just a little too abrupt, as though Eggers had lost interest in the project - which is why it's a four-star read for me, and not five. I'd have liked more of a resolution, and a hint of what awaited Alan on his return to the US.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Power seeps out of the American dream and also from the man who bought...
Alan Clay, Eggers' protagonist in this timely novel, is a worried man. He is in debt up to his armpits. Read more
Published 2 months ago by R. Brocklehurst
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great
Actually I more than like it. It made me sad for the American economy. I shall remember this book. I think Eggers is a great American writer.
Published 2 months ago by Caroline Pick
4.0 out of 5 stars
A real sense of place
It took me a while to work out why I liked this book. It's subject matter isn't all together promising - a failing middle-aged man in Saudi Arabia. Read more
Published 2 months ago by Liz
3.0 out of 5 stars
Prospero
I had not read any of Dave Eggers's work before, but found A Hologram for the King enjoyable, if not particularly profound. Read more
Published 2 months ago by James Tansley
3.0 out of 5 stars
Decline and rise
A parable of the decline of American competitiveness in the face of the rise of Chinese manufacturing prowess interwoven with the personal decline of a middle aged American... Read more
Published 3 months ago by Mr. Ronald V. White
5.0 out of 5 stars
I am sure you will love this page-turner. I did!
Maybe I just like sad middle-aged male protagonists, and after all, Paul Theroux and Martin Amis are probably my favourite authors. Read more
Published 3 months ago by Toby Rowland
5.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliant
It's brilliant, of course, it's by Dave Eggers, what would you expect?
His first book is still my favourite though.
His first book is still my favourite though.
Published 3 months ago by Jennifer Coldwell
2.0 out of 5 stars
Disliked it
I bought this book on the basis of a couple of cracking reviews in the press. Alas, it was not for mel I did finish it, but I didn't find it engrossing, nor particularly well put... Read more
Published 4 months ago by Tulabelle
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