- Hardcover: 320 pages
- Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group; First Edition edition (Nov 1978)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 039450268X
- ISBN-13: 978-0394502687
- Product Dimensions: 15 x 3.2 x 22 cm
- Average Customer Review: 2.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,297,404 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
The Coup (Penguin Modern Classics)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
The Coup describes violent events in the imaginary African nation of Kush, a large, landlocked, drought-ridden, sub-Saharan country led by Colonel Hakim Félix Ellelloû. (“A leader,” writes Colonel Ellelloû, “is one who, out of madness or goodness, takes upon himself the woe of a people. There are few men so foolish.”) Colonel Ellelloû has four wives, a silver Mercedes, and a fanatic aversion—cultural, ideological, and personal—to the United States. But the U.S. keeps creeping into Kush, and the repercussions of this incursion constitute the events of the novel. Colonel Ellelloû tells his own story—always elegantly, and often in the third person—from an undisclosed location in the South of France.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
About the Author
John (Hoyer) Updike (1932-) American novelist, short story writer and poet, internationally known for his novels RABBIT, RUN (1960), RABBIT REDUX (1971), RABBIT IS RICH (1981), and RABBIT AT REST (1990). His latest novel is VILLAGES (Penguin, 2005).
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
Format:Paperback
I enjoyed this offering from Updike.A little different from his usual scenarios but artfully written as usual.Sentences of genius on nearly every page help the story along nicely whether likely in Africa at that time or not,I really have no idea.The main character Ellellou ends up writing his memoirs in France,in a kind of society he wanted his homeland to avoid becoming,he didn't want it overrun with traffic and capitalist vices but kept simple and primitive.Here in my opinion is the hidden depth in this book and what a good raison detre it is."France..-an island of perfect civilization,self-satisfying,decaying,deaf."
0 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Where to begin? You carry your expectations to a book, and this one missed the mark so badly for me that I found it at times laughable and infuriating.
First, Updike displays absolutely no insight into the characters involved in this novel. They are like characters straight out of Time magazine articles utterly lacking in depth or realism.
Second, the voice that he uses - a kind of lamenting first person - was so pathetically unconvincing and flat that I cannot see how anyone can believe any of the events recounted here. I kept feeling like this was written by some high school kid in the suburbs, that is the level of it - like a comic book.
Third, Updike shows no insight into the historical plight of Africa. Again, it goes back to how appalingly superficial this seemed to me - it reads like an exercise in outlandish rhetoric without connection to events or reality. Another thing that perplexed me about the reviewers here is that they claim there is satire and comedy in this, but I simply didn't see it, perhaps because irony requires a deep understanding of a subject.
As such, there is nothing whatsoever to recommend this book, not even Updike's penchant for soft porn. The subject matter simply escaped him, for all I can guess, and he was way way out of his depth.
If you liked this book, I would recommend camparing it to Bend in the River, by VS Naipal. That book succeeds brilliantly at everything this one fails at so miserably.
Not recommended.
First, Updike displays absolutely no insight into the characters involved in this novel. They are like characters straight out of Time magazine articles utterly lacking in depth or realism.
Second, the voice that he uses - a kind of lamenting first person - was so pathetically unconvincing and flat that I cannot see how anyone can believe any of the events recounted here. I kept feeling like this was written by some high school kid in the suburbs, that is the level of it - like a comic book.
Third, Updike shows no insight into the historical plight of Africa. Again, it goes back to how appalingly superficial this seemed to me - it reads like an exercise in outlandish rhetoric without connection to events or reality. Another thing that perplexed me about the reviewers here is that they claim there is satire and comedy in this, but I simply didn't see it, perhaps because irony requires a deep understanding of a subject.
As such, there is nothing whatsoever to recommend this book, not even Updike's penchant for soft porn. The subject matter simply escaped him, for all I can guess, and he was way way out of his depth.
If you liked this book, I would recommend camparing it to Bend in the River, by VS Naipal. That book succeeds brilliantly at everything this one fails at so miserably.
Not recommended.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
12 reviews
19 of 22 people found the following review helpful
An astute and humorous look at Cold War politics in Africa
12 Oct 1998
Format:Hardcover
If you have ever lived or worked in Sahelian Africa (or in the developing world in general) read this book! At first I had my doubts that a man who is best known for portraying suburban America could write about Africa. But the same keen eye for social nuance, and biting humor come to bear on a fictional Sahelian country and its leader who is playing the Cold War superpowers against one another for fun and profit. I think what impressed me the most, was Updike's ability to get inside the head of an African leader who has one foot in Western academia and the other in his pre-Saharan village. And, of course, Updike writes beautifully on just about any topic. I have read a lot of books about Africa, from the literary to mundane travelogues, but this book ranks among my favorites both for its humour and the underlying insight to what's gone wrong in Western relations with Africa.
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Sad or Funny?
9 Feb 2006
Format:Mass Market Paperback
Before picking this book up, I had no preconceived notions. I have never read Updike, and I have never heard of the book. After the first chapter, I was ready for a serious look at innocent African poverty and the evil Western world. But I soon found out that this book was more of a comedy than anything else. About a fictitious nation (which I believe represents Ethiopia), this book is told from the point of view of this nation's president. The book was written in 1978 and mocks both Islam and Marxism. I don't believe a book like this would survive today's form of censorship called political correctness, but I found it refreshingly funny. Literature and art of today is fond of mocking Christianity and Democracy (which is fine, it is their right) but rarely can anything outside of those two things be poked fun at, this book helped point that fact out.
John Updike is obviously a great writer. It took me several dozen pages to get used to his writing style (heavy on satire and very witty), but I learned to really enjoy it. As an American living in a third world country- I could relate to several of the scenarios in the book. But instead of driving home any kind of moral lessons or preaching political preferences, Updike just makes a funny story out of these situations. Too often fiction has underlying agendas which overwhelm and overshadow the story. At times this is good, but usually it is annoying. Updike does nothing of the sort in this book, there is just good fiction and good laughs. I look forward to reading some of Updike's other stuff, as he is a very talented and enjoyable writer.
John Updike is obviously a great writer. It took me several dozen pages to get used to his writing style (heavy on satire and very witty), but I learned to really enjoy it. As an American living in a third world country- I could relate to several of the scenarios in the book. But instead of driving home any kind of moral lessons or preaching political preferences, Updike just makes a funny story out of these situations. Too often fiction has underlying agendas which overwhelm and overshadow the story. At times this is good, but usually it is annoying. Updike does nothing of the sort in this book, there is just good fiction and good laughs. I look forward to reading some of Updike's other stuff, as he is a very talented and enjoyable writer.
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful
All Animals Are Equal...
5 May 2003
Format:Hardcover
Updike has created a strangely loveable tyrant in Ellelou. An impotent, Islamic fundamentalist zealot, Ellelou is the president of a mythical African socialist republic, Kush, and he narrates this great bad dream of a book. His voice is expertly used to comically tease out and eventually lay bare the self serving hypocrisy at the heart of Soviet and US power politics as the cold war nears its end in the late 60s/early 70s. A supporting cast is wonderfully sketched. The bureaucratic toad with the silk Parisian shirts and penchant for all things western, Ezana, is very funny. The delightfully spirited yet doomed liberal Amercan wife of Ellelou, Candy, (whom he seduced and transplanted to Kush having met at university in America) recalls the noble yet faintly ridiculous "human shield" volunteers who set off to deflect the American bombs in the recent Iraq war only to fall out along the way in a cloud of petty squabbles. Ellelou's many other wives are a joy to behold and often quite saucy. The American diplomat Klipspringer is wonderfully vacant, simple of mind and outlook, eternally buoyant and optimistic, no doubt he went on to great things under Reagan!
This is all great fun and no one escapes the authors scalpel that dissects, via jibes and faux-dogmatism, the vacancy at the heart of everything. All are treated equally here: middle class America, drunken (stereotypical unfortunately) Russian missile crews, the USA's private racial embarrassment, the worlds great religions, clownish black Muslim students, superpower policy in the poorest countries, arrogant white liberal professors (who understand Africa better than Africans...!), naive peace workers, the paper-thin nature of African government, jet-setting diplomats, all are given equal rights to make themselves look foolish - which is a lot of fun but not very optimistic. Updike's future is always bleak. I think he sees the future of human history as a facsimile of its past, only bigger and worse: more war, more violence, more division, more exploitation, more dogma, more illness, more pollution, more greed, more stupidity - and ultimately, no doubt, a perfect peace. But there'll be no one left to enjoy it. I think he's probably right, humans cant help themselves and were all fiddling while Rome burns. Updikes unique strength (his obvious talent aside) is that hes one of the few writers who sees this and points it out, without offering any sort of optimism, solution or last chance. Certainly, hes the most eloquent of these visionaries. His gift is to get to the heart of matters and show us that there's little of merit there.
The novel loses a little focus from the point where the former King of Kushs head (a Soviet funded re-animated robot version of the one decapitated publicly by Ellelou) speaks to visiting tourist parties. This leads to an odd and dreamlike penultimate segment in a sleek mirrored glass city, a capitalist Eden that has sprung up in the Sahara thanks to the discovery of that slippery black stuff that causes so much trouble today. But there is a staggeringly powerful and amazingly well written mid-section in which Ellelou travels the remote regions of Kushs badlands, with his stoned and racy wife Sheba in tow, and the narrative switches effortlessly between his college days as a disgusted, vaguely amused and mostly detached student in the States and the parched present as the president of next to nothing. A great book, buy it and read it, it has a lot to say about our own troubled times but absolutely nothing to offer them, which is - I think - the whole point of John Updike.
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