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Percival Everett

Look no further for a challenging intellectual read. On the one hand it made me look up exactly what Roland Barthes stood for, to see what was being satirised. (No, go look it up yourself.) On the other, there was a slapstick story of a child prodigy and a chase across America. Will baby Ralph escape the CIA?

Extract

Barthes took to coming around unannounced. Eve didn't like that. The man was impossible to talk to. In fact, language barrier aside, even the simplest transaction in a market became a huge production for the man. If it wasn't his insisting that he could not possibly understand why apples had different names since they were, after all, all apples, it was because the line was too long or the store was too cold or the cashier was too surly or that the cashier didn't know who he was.

Parallels