A couple of years after The Great Recession’s initial
wallop, a “post-modern Willy Loman” careens from day to day in Saudi Arabia,
leading a corporate IT team hoping to sell a holographic conferencing system to
the country’s king. Spare prose communicates the protagonist’s and other
expatriate’s distracted and defensive disconnection, both from the Very Foreign
Culture surrounding them and their own lives. For the American,
emblematic problems wait back home as he waits for the king.
Fans of author Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of
Staggering Genius and Zeitoun will find this “Hemingwayesque” prose
a departure from those well received works. A Hologram For The King
was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Award.
~Joseph Chmura, Assistant Director and Access Services Librarian
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