Sunday 26 April 2015

Book ~ "Worst. Person. Ever." (2013) Douglas Coupland

From Goodreads ~ Meet Raymond Gunt. A decent chap who tries to do the right thing. Or, to put it another way, the worst person ever: a foul-mouthed, misanthropic cameraman, trailing creditors, ex-wives and unhappy homeless people in his wake. Men dislike him, women flee from him.

"Worst. Person. Ever." is a deeply unworthy book about a dreadful human being with absolutely no redeeming social value. Gunt, in the words of the author, "is a living, walking, talking, hot steaming pile of pure id." He's a B-unit cameraman who enters an amusing downward failure spiral that takes him from London to Los Angeles and then on to an obscure island in the Pacific where a major American TV network is shooting a Survivor-style reality show. 

Along the way, Gunt suffers multiple comas and unjust imprisonment, is forced to re-enact the "Angry Dance" from the movie Billy Elliot and finds himself at the centre of a nuclear war. We also meet Raymond's upwardly failing sidekick, Neal, as well as Raymond's ex-wife, Fiona, herself "an atomic bomb of pain".

Even though he really puts the ‘anti’ in anti-hero, you may find Raymond Gunt an oddly likeable character. 

Raymond Gunt's ex-wife, Fiona who he hates, hires him as a cameraman for a Survivor-like show.  He is able to bring a slave an assistant so he hires a homeless guy named Neal and they head off to the island in the Pacific where the show will be taped. Along the way, they encounter many distractions including imprisonment, nuclear war, comas and more.

Gord read this book last year and thought it was hoot and suggested I check it out.  I started out enjoying it.  Raymond is an A-hole but doesn't realize it and I found him amusing.  He is really nasty to others and doesn't care about the ramifications.

I thought the story was fun and was enjoying the writing style ... until the story started getting more and more stupid and boring.  I tried to stick with it but finally gave up at the 67% point after the skin tag incident.  Not my kind of story, I guess.

As a head's up, there is a lot of swearing.

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