- Paperback: 326 pages
- Publisher: Penguin Books; Tra edition (29 May 2007)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0143038117
- ISBN-13: 978-0143038115
- Product Dimensions: 18.1 x 13 x 1.6 cm
- Average Customer Review: 1.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
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From the Publisher
A strikingly original, acidly funny and surreal French first novel, a cross between Michel Houellebecq, Alan Warner and Lord of the Flies. The stuff of which cults are made.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Creepy and bleak,
By
This review is from: School's Out (Paperback)
It's a remarkably smart story: ironic, self-deprecating, bleak and funny. The point of the book is not the plot per se, but rather the selfish, remote and alienated viewpoints of both the main character and his charges.
Yes, the book is filled with reflexive and amusingly supercillious French philosophy - sometimes it's just so silly you laugh out loud. At other times, one isn't quite so certain how frivolous the book is being: there are some disturbing descriptions and commentary in it, particularly related to adolescent alienation and loss. Dufosse is superb at describing the ambiguity of youth: a time when people are strong-willed and idealistic, but willing, too, to lose their own identity to further belief. And it's that confusion, that great philsophical muddle which make the book so complicated. Just how far should one be taken in? And just how possible is it for such terrible events to occur? If you're looking for a book with a whizz-bang thriller plot, you'll be bitterly disappointed. But if you're looking for a very intriguing and somewhat strange read, you'll be more than satisfied. Fans of Houellebecq will probably love this book. Fans of thriller fiction and beach reading will be bored.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Enigmatic and sinister heart,
By
This review is from: School's Out (Paperback)
In a contemporary French school a young teacher jumps out of his classroom window and dies. Pierre, his replacement, finds that none of the other teachers are prepared to take over his class and, indeed, warn him to have nothing to do with them. Taking on 9F, he finds them strangely regimented and well-behaved, doing everything as a group rather than as a collection of individuals. And two of the pupils who try to break away, are brought menacingly back to the collective.
The cover blurb claims this book recalls Tart's The Secret History but, for me, it was far closer to The Midwich Cuckoos, with shades of Lord of the Flies and even The Turn of the Screw. Unfortunately, despite these literary allegiances, the novel fails to live up to its own premise. Rambling and discursive, it spends too long focusing on the life of Pierre when all the tension and menace of the book is imbued in the children of class 9F. Ultimately this could have been a remarkable novel - ambitious, ambiguous, open-ended - but everything fascinating and menacing at its centre seemed to have got bogged down and also covered over by the rambling musings of the first person teacher narrator. So huge potential, but ultimately dissatisfying.
8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Disappointing,
By
This review is from: School's Out (Paperback)
Life is too short! What a waste of good reading time. Boring. Bad translation. I only finished it as I hoped the end would make it all worth while....wrong!
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