- Hardcover: 256 pages
- Publisher: Headline Review; 1st ed. edition (26 Aug 1999)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 074722157X
- ISBN-13: 978-0747221579
- Product Dimensions: 21.6 x 14.2 x 2.8 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 2,877,704 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Going Loco
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More About the Author
Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
In late 1976 a German newspaper broke the story that three members of ABBA had been killed in a plane crash at Berlin's Templehof Airport (Frida survived, horribly disfigured, if you're wondering) and that they had been silently replaced by imposters. A rival hypothesis had it that ABBA were the studio creation of some particularly ugly Swedes and that the smiling happy people on those videos were in fact actors. If Lynne Truss doesn't know these rumours about double ABBAs, then there's something distinctly uncanny about her new novel ...
Belinda Johansson is a happily married Claphamite writer, a teensy bit self-absorbed, who decides to abandon her girls' horsey stories to investigate the literary life of the doppelgänger. Around the same time, she hires Linda as her cleaner and then watches helplessly as Linda gradually takes over her life, becoming Be-Linda. Meanwhile her actress friend Maggie is sleeping with the double of her therapist's husband and investigations suggest that Belinda's husband Stefan is not in fact a Swedish geneticist at all ... Trying out a hitherto unknown ABBA-inflected Anglo-Swedish idiomatic, Truss tightens up all her narrative strands to breaking point and then stands well back, letting them unwind at breakneck speed. Funny, pacy, scary, neurotic and addictive. Just like ABBA. -- Alan Stewart, Amazon.co.uk
Product Description
When Belinda, a writer married to Stefan, a geneticist, hires a cleaner called Linda, she gets more than she bargained for. With a knack for making drudgery seem glamorous, it's not long before Linda seems to take over Belinda's whole life.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Title: "Too crazy for me . . . to be considered comical"
Have read Lynne Truss's "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" and "Talk to the Hand" also would give her 5 stars on "Making the Cats Laugh". "Amazon.com/UK" only gave
the last mentioned 3 stars.
This book is despicable. I went back to the Amazon 6 star review to find out what prompted me to actually buy it! Only one person reviewed it .That was
my mistake. I hadn't noticed this in my enthusiasm over her other books. I read the review which said the book was hilarious comedy. Not so!
What is there not to like? Well, just about everything after the first half. . . it drags on and on. Her Swedish people are trite and "corny". and downright silly. Maybe a visitor from England who has had a holiday in Sweden will appreciate it and think it funny. People will remember ABBA a musical group she draws heavily on as
though the only good thing about Sweden is ABBA. It is insular and rediculous.
It is grisly, and although Truss is intelligent and gifted , she has managed to conjure up a grisely, disgusting cesspool of a book with a lot of neurotic and
psychotic characters linked together by their careers in the publishing business and their jobs and tawdry sordid sexual depravity. Viv & Maggie and all the women
seem to be corrupt as liars, sluts or cruel she-cats!
Lynne's contempt for her own country of British society of today comes through in :"Talk to the Hand" and "Making the Cats Laugh" but it seems that she has decided that if you can't" beat them then join them" and she created this horrific monster of a book which far from being funny is sad and very sinister. Who laughs at grisely mad violence. Her contempt for Britain has hit rock bottom in this book.
Whoever finds this book amusing to the point of funny should seriously examine their values. I am British but have by fate been living my life in other countries.
This book is just one of many "signals" which keeps me away from visiting the UK furthur than its airports.
Cannibals , no doubt, also get a charge out of their victims and laugh while killing them. Is Britain turning that dark? Are their no redeeming features of grace,
innocence and goodness left? Has Britain become a cesspool. Pity us smaller countries like Norway and Sweden who still have old-fashioned values or
standards of right thinking and goodness left. albeit we are all human and it is difficult to reach our ideals we set for ourselves. Under the guise of COMEDY and
MADNESS shall we write FILTH? Lynne Truss, you are on a right track to make MONEY but, otherwise, this book is so much garbage! ALL the characters from Belinda,
Linda and then Stefan and his first wife and Noel, Jago etc are extremely corrupt and evil yet made out to be cute and funny. This is insidious and pervasively
destructive for the naive reader.
I am " crossing my fingers" that her other 2 books waiting to be read: "With one Lousy Free Packet of Seed" & "A Certain Age" will have redeeming features!
Have read Lynne Truss's "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" and "Talk to the Hand" also would give her 5 stars on "Making the Cats Laugh". "Amazon.com/UK" only gave
the last mentioned 3 stars.
This book is despicable. I went back to the Amazon 6 star review to find out what prompted me to actually buy it! Only one person reviewed it .That was
my mistake. I hadn't noticed this in my enthusiasm over her other books. I read the review which said the book was hilarious comedy. Not so!
What is there not to like? Well, just about everything after the first half. . . it drags on and on. Her Swedish people are trite and "corny". and downright silly. Maybe a visitor from England who has had a holiday in Sweden will appreciate it and think it funny. People will remember ABBA a musical group she draws heavily on as
though the only good thing about Sweden is ABBA. It is insular and rediculous.
It is grisly, and although Truss is intelligent and gifted , she has managed to conjure up a grisely, disgusting cesspool of a book with a lot of neurotic and
psychotic characters linked together by their careers in the publishing business and their jobs and tawdry sordid sexual depravity. Viv & Maggie and all the women
seem to be corrupt as liars, sluts or cruel she-cats!
Lynne's contempt for her own country of British society of today comes through in :"Talk to the Hand" and "Making the Cats Laugh" but it seems that she has decided that if you can't" beat them then join them" and she created this horrific monster of a book which far from being funny is sad and very sinister. Who laughs at grisely mad violence. Her contempt for Britain has hit rock bottom in this book.
Whoever finds this book amusing to the point of funny should seriously examine their values. I am British but have by fate been living my life in other countries.
This book is just one of many "signals" which keeps me away from visiting the UK furthur than its airports.
Cannibals , no doubt, also get a charge out of their victims and laugh while killing them. Is Britain turning that dark? Are their no redeeming features of grace,
innocence and goodness left? Has Britain become a cesspool. Pity us smaller countries like Norway and Sweden who still have old-fashioned values or
standards of right thinking and goodness left. albeit we are all human and it is difficult to reach our ideals we set for ourselves. Under the guise of COMEDY and
MADNESS shall we write FILTH? Lynne Truss, you are on a right track to make MONEY but, otherwise, this book is so much garbage! ALL the characters from Belinda,
Linda and then Stefan and his first wife and Noel, Jago etc are extremely corrupt and evil yet made out to be cute and funny. This is insidious and pervasively
destructive for the naive reader.
I am " crossing my fingers" that her other 2 books waiting to be read: "With one Lousy Free Packet of Seed" & "A Certain Age" will have redeeming features!
2 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
What a brilliantly funny book; such an enjoyable read. Lynne Truss has a very clever mind to have thought of all the twists and turns and to have written with such humour. Perhaps you have to be a little bit made yourself to enjoy it!
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
3 reviews
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Lynne Truss goes loco....
21 Jun 2004
Format:Paperback
After reading her thoroughly enjoyable "Eats, Shoots & Leaves," I came across this wonderfully funny bit of fiction from the mind of Lynne Truss. What a great -- and completely different -- follow up to her grammar rant.
Hilarious!
2 Jun 2010
Format:Paperback
This is a comic novel about many, many things. There are several interrelated plots going on all at once. There is too much to summarize, but everything is constructed around the theme of the doppleganger. There are many doubles in this book--people who look alike, people who take on one another's identity, people who complement and supplement each other in various ways--and all the subplots look at the double from a different angle.
The humor of this novel is based around absurd characters and bizarre plot twists. However, no matter how ridiculous things get, Truss's characters remain in the moment and true to their natures. Because of this, the story did not strain my suspension of disbelief. To the end I felt invested in the characters. This is what makes the jokes funny and keeps the plot twists interesting.
What makes this book truly memorable is that this tangle of plot twists is all constructed around a theme. Thus, the surprises, while still unexpected, never seem arbitrary. Instead, they all seem perfectly natural, exactly as they should be. Everything seems part of a unified whole, and each twist seems to reveal more of it.
The humor of this novel is based around absurd characters and bizarre plot twists. However, no matter how ridiculous things get, Truss's characters remain in the moment and true to their natures. Because of this, the story did not strain my suspension of disbelief. To the end I felt invested in the characters. This is what makes the jokes funny and keeps the plot twists interesting.
What makes this book truly memorable is that this tangle of plot twists is all constructed around a theme. Thus, the surprises, while still unexpected, never seem arbitrary. Instead, they all seem perfectly natural, exactly as they should be. Everything seems part of a unified whole, and each twist seems to reveal more of it.
wild ride
12 Dec 2008
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
If you like plot twists this is a good book for you...I don't think it will ever be a classic but it's an entertaining read.
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