- Paperback: 224 pages
- Publisher: Melville House (April 1 2007)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1933633255
- ISBN-13: 978-1933633251
- Product Dimensions: 13.3 x 1.2 x 19 cm
- Shipping Weight: 227 g
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #125,174 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Publishers Weekly
Poet and blogger Lin's debut novel uneasily documents the life of Andrew, a recent college graduate working at Domino's Pizza while over-analyzing every aspect of his life: past, present and futureless. He drives through the suburbs reminiscing about college life in New York and his ex-girlfriend, stopping occasionally to express his boredom to his best friend Steve. When at one point, Andrew states that he wants to "wreak complex and profound havoc" upon capitalist establishments such as McDonald's, it feels like Lin is attempting the same kind of attack on organized art. The novel, while short on plot, makes abrupt shifts in setting and point of view, and is pierced throughout by celebrity cameos and surreal touches: bears, dolphins (who say "Eeeee Eee Eeee" to express emotion, in spite of their ability to speak like humans), Salman Rushdie, and the president make grandiose declarations that are heavily saturated with the same sardonic wit displayed by Andrew and his friends. The novel dips dangerously into metafiction, with Andrew in the middle of "writing a book of stories about people who are doomed." The characters' repetitive thoughts and conversations become strangely hypnotic, however, and Lin's sympathetic fascination with the meaning of life is full of profound and often hilarious insights.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Product Description
"Tao Lin writes from moods that less radical writers would let pass — from laziness, from vacancy, from boredom. And it turns out that his report from these places is moving and necessary, not to mention frequently hilarious."—Miranda July
Tao Lin’s book blog, reader-of-depressing-books.blogspot.com, has made him one of the most talked-about young writers on the scene today. His commentaries taking mainstream writers to task and calling for the death of commercial writing have generated nonstop discussion and made him the subject of innumerable profiles on leading cultural websites, from McSweeney’s to Bookslut to Gawker and on. Meanwhile, his fiction appears regularly in the ’zines and websites defining the new culture.
Lin meets and surpasses all expectations in a debut novel set in the bizarre alternative reality of today’s youth culture. EEEEE EEE EEEE is a pleasingly sophisticated work, an unself-conscious yet commanding tour de force about the search for meaning in a culture gone mad with celebrities and advertising.
Depicting a group of friends transitioning between school and adulthood, Lin’s prose is strikingly stylish, funny, and lyrical, as he reminds us that youth is still—refreshingly—a time of deep questioning, poignant realization, fun, and hope. It is a place where animals talk, books and music matter, honesty counts, and you can ask, without fear of embarrassment, “What’s a Jhumpa Lahiri?”
It is a sparkling, joyous debut.
Tao Lin, also author of the story collection Bed, lives in New York City.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
4.5 out of 5 stars (44 customer reviews)
57 of 63 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The best book about dominos pizza ever written., Nov 21 2007
By Aziraphael - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Eeeee Eee Eeee (Paperback)
"Sometimes when dolphins went to playgrounds alone they did the monkeybars and went to the swings and on the swings thought, "I hate this stupid world."
They thought, "I hate it."
They cried a little with the wind against their face.
They felt so bad that they went away.
And found Elijah Wood and told Elijah Wood to go with them and Elijah Wood went--because he thought it was a movie. Elijah Wood and other celebrities like Salman Rushdie rode dolphins in rivers. Salman Rushdie felt proud and famous. And the dolphins swam to islands and beat Elijah Wood and the other famous people with heavy branches. They cried when they murdered human beings, and it was terrible.
One dolphin had a battle axe and killed Wong Kar-Wai."
That's an excerpt from Tao Lin's new book Eeeee Eee Eeee. I'm pretty sure the book doesn't mean anything which is why you should read it. It's about post-ironic boredom and laziness and saying things like "I don't know how to have fun" all the time.
If you care the book is kind of like if Holden Caulfield wrote an autobiography in the middle of a Hunter S. Thompson freakout. It is very "Kafka-esque" which is a phrase that annoys the hell out of my friend Rachel, and rightfully so because it's a dumb thing to say.
Go pick it up and read it and hate it (probably), but read it. It will change nothing about you but it will make you think about bears teleporting and throwing blankets on top of moose(s), which is so much better than most things.
38 of 45 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Tao Lin's best, April 14 2007
By P. K. Almond "a mother" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Eeeee Eee Eeee (Paperback)
Although Tao Lin has been consecutively strong in all of his books so far, I think EEEEE EEE EEEE is his best. The book not only confronts the indifference of the universe but sarcastically laughs in its face. The book has a lot of dolphins and bears trying to cope with life's disappointments such as Jhumpa Lahiri, Elijah Wood, and the DaVinci Code. The DaVinci Code isn't actually mentioned in the books as the other things are but if it were a moose would probably look at it and then scream in agony before running in front of a subway train. I recommend this book for all ages. I first read it with my kids and they both liked it and often beg for me to read chapters of it to them before they go to sleep.
24 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
SPOILER ALERT, April 29 2007
By suburban sig "signeficant" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Eeeee Eee Eeee (Paperback)
Andrew just graduated college. He has no job, no friends, and no funds. He moves from New York City back to his parents' house in Florida and gets a job as a delivery guy for Domino's Pizza. After a socially awkward experience of bringing some pizzas and his coworker Joanna to her house, Andrew is approached by a bear who leads him down a secret passageway under a patch of grass to an underground world in which bears coexist with moose, dolphins, hamsters, and aliens.
Enter the literary world of Tao Lin's Eeeee Eee Eeee: self-conscious, surreal, and ambivalently nihilistic. The novel is at the same time heartbreaking and hilarious. Tao Lin's bleak and syntactically direct style undermines the notion of an overt social commentary, but the novel is chalk-full of it. The main character Andrew is lonely, spends a lot of his time isolated, and pretty much ponders the absurdity of everything. Eeeee Eee Eeee alludes to the absurdity of social etiquette, commercialism, unity, separateness, Modern thought, Post-modern thought, other binary philosophies, and even meaning itself.
Take for example when Andrew meets the President of the United States, who is really just a bored alien in need of a goal. The president concludes that life is meaningless, but then questions "If life was really meaningless you wouldn't worry about things." Andrew worries about a lot of things: why his internet girlfriend Sara never comes to visit him even though she promised, why people confuse his jokes for complaining, why the bear never finishes the novel he is writing, and why the dolphin he is talking to murders Elijah Wood and then "drags Elijah's corpse into a cave and then sits on it."
Truly, Tao Lin accurately depicts the mind of the socially isolated with his subject Andrew. Although the reader can recognize Andrew's symptoms of Midtwenties-itis, Eeeee Eee Eee is far from your typically romanticized "Oh no I just graduated college and I don't know who I am or what to do with myself" novel. Anyone who has ever questioned their existence should read it. Perhaps it would make a thoughtful gift for someone who will or has recently graduated
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