- Paperback: 160 pages
- Publisher: Granta Books; New edition edition (20 Feb 2003)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 1862075565
- ISBN-13: 978-1862075566
- Product Dimensions: 19.2 x 12.8 x 1.4 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 741,415 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Review
""Willem Elsscbot (1882-1960), whose real name was Alfons de Ridder, was the Dutch Italo Svevo: an advertising executive whose rueful comic novels dramatized the plight of the 'little man' in a busy world with a rare combination of comedy and pathos. The protagonist here is Frans Laarmans, a nondescript shipping clerk whose promotion to European agent for his Antwerp firm's Edam cheese plunges him into a nightmare of obligation and bureaucratic complexity. As Laarmans frets and panics, hundreds of wheels of Edam sit, stink-ripening into an ingenious metaphor for the burdens imposed by their reluctant possessor's frenzied pursuit of status and security. A masterpiece...and one that's enormous fun to read."
Product Description
Cheese is a gentle, satirical fable of capitalism and wealth. A clerk in Antwerp suddenly becomes the chief agent in Belgium and Luxembourg for this red-rinded Dutch delight and is saddled with 370 cases containing ten thousand full-cream cheeses. But he has no idea how to run a business, or how to sell his goods, and he doesn't even like cheese. Steeped in the atmosphere of the 1930s, in a world full of smart operators and and failed businessmen, Cheese gracefully incorporates the rigid class divisions of the time and a man's obsession with status. It is as relevant in our age of Internet investors and dot.com failures as it was when it was written.
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First Sentence
I'm writing to you again at last because great things are about to happen, and it's all Mr van Schoonbeke's doing. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
I'm writing to you again at last because great things are about to happen, and it's all Mr van Schoonbeke's doing. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Set in the early 1930s, Cheese is the story of Frans Laarmans' sudden foray into the cheese import business courtesy of a enigmatic, wealthy mentor Mr van Schoonbeke. Simply written as Laarmans' account, it is a moving fable of the perils of idolising the wealth and status of others.
Laarmans, a shipping clerk, takes up the sudden opportunity following the death of his mother, to import Edam cheese to Belgium and the Grand Duchy. However, as a shipping clerk, he has absolutely no experience of business, no help and plenty of people (family and new wealthy friends) observing his progress. He doesn't even like cheese and the comic potential is all too evident, but at times Laarmans' naivity and inexperience is so toe-curlingly painful that it's hard to keep reading.
Both funny and moving, Cheese is a little book with a lot to say about status and that old lesson of the bird in the hand being worth two in the bush.
Laarmans, a shipping clerk, takes up the sudden opportunity following the death of his mother, to import Edam cheese to Belgium and the Grand Duchy. However, as a shipping clerk, he has absolutely no experience of business, no help and plenty of people (family and new wealthy friends) observing his progress. He doesn't even like cheese and the comic potential is all too evident, but at times Laarmans' naivity and inexperience is so toe-curlingly painful that it's hard to keep reading.
Both funny and moving, Cheese is a little book with a lot to say about status and that old lesson of the bird in the hand being worth two in the bush.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
If you have any interest in either cheese or the comic form, buy and read this unknown (in English anyway) work of genius. Hilarious and poignant.
8 of 20 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
This is a really sweet novel following a bored shipping clerk who leaves his job to try his luck in cheese sales.
It's mildly amusing, but never funny. Quite sad, but never tragic. Engaging, but not gripping. The best part of the book is the authors explanation of how to write tragedy which is a beautiful little insight into writing style.
If you liked Diary of a Nobody or Three Men in a Boat, you'll probably like this. Just not as much.
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