Shopping - Softcover

Kramer, Gavin

2.98

50 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1857028074 ISBN 13: 9781857028072

Publisher: Fourth Estate, 1998

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

Outstanding first novel from a new voice in British fiction – a Lolita for our times.

Meadowlark is a lonely man. He pins portraits of the Prime Minister and the Queen to his apartment wall. Sent to work in the Tokyo office, he soon becomes lost and ill at ease in the world of besuited Englishmen who, slaves to the office by day, cruise the neonlit nightspots by night with their dispensable cash, fuelled by alcohol and the prospect of casual sex. It isn’t long before Meadowlark undergoes an eerie change that shocks his colleagues: he falls in love with a fourteen year old Japanese girl.

Gavin Kramer’s first novel is the story of this relationship: a portrait of an obsession, a doomed love affair, an Englishman abroad and out of place, bemused and confused and ultimately beaten by an alien culture.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

Review:

If Graham Greene had turned 30 at the millennium and seen the shiny, noisy world of postmodern Tokyo, then he could well have written Gavin Kramer's first novel, Shopping. The world of Shopping is the bleak, disorienting urbanity of English thirtysomethings at the sharp end of the Generation X culture; trying to survive on a diet of high finance, alcohol, fast food and Japanese "Yellow Cabs", good-time girls whose designer wardrobes are paid for by obliging gaijin, foreign men with the right level of purchasing power.

The gaijin of Kramer's novel are two lowly English lawyers, the unnamed laconic narrator and Meadowlark, a clumsily over-sized Englishman with a penchant for Chariots of Fire videos and portraits of the Queen and Margaret Thatcher which hang on the walls of his anonymous Tokyo flat. At turns repelled and fascinated by Meadowlark, the narrator follows his colleague's descent into madness as he becomes entangled with the beautiful but vacuous Sachiko, a sixteen year-old streetwise schoolgirl who funds her desire for the latest designer labels by selling her plastic-wrapped soiled underwear to wealthy Japanese businessmen.

Kramer's prose is precise and unrelenting in its grim, although at times darkly humorous exploration of the misunderstandings of cultural difference which define that most cosmopolitan and hybrid of postmodern cities, Tokyo. As the novel cruises the shops, bars, clubs, parties and fast-food joints of the city, and the heat, noise and glare burgeon, the sheen of the city gives way to an altogether darker and more sinister vision, which leads to the increasingly unstable Meadowlark running through the streets dressed as an enormous fowl, appropriately advertising the delights of CRAZEE CHICKEN. Shopping is a dark and uncompromising first novel, and if Kramer had glimpsed the future, then the lesson would have been: avoid Tokyo for the millennium --Jerry Brotton.

From the Back Cover:

Shortlisted for the 1998 Whitbread First Novel Award
Winner of the 1998 David Higham Prize

Winner of the 1999 Geofrey Faber Memorial Prize

Alistair Meadowlark is an English lawyer in Tokyo who doesn't understand the strange new world around him. He's tall and gawky and his hosts similarly can't comprehend him. And then he meets Sachiko, would-be starlet, aspirant businesswoman, consummate shopper, a pocket-sized femme fatale fully plugged into the system that is slowly driving Meadowlark mad. Through the neon streets and freak shows and love hotels of Tokyo, Gavin Kramer's remarkable first novel charts this eroticised culture clash and the inevitable demise of the infatuated Meadowlark.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.