The preliminary stage of the journey made by
the fakir (who is not so much a mystic as a con man) is straightforward enough,
arriving at Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport by a scheduled flight from India,
thence by taxi to one of that city’s IKEA stores.
His mission there, to buy a new bed of
nails, has a quirky if unlikely sound to it; his plan to pay for it with a
photocopied (one side only) one hundred Euro note smacks of the
ridiculous. He uses the same note to
temporarily pay his taxi fare, temporarily as he retrieves it from the driver’s
wallet by means of an attached invisible piece of elastic.
Those readers amused by this premise and
willing to suspend critical facilities may enjoy the remainder of the book,
which continues in similar vein with improbable coincidences covering up a
thinly worked plot otherwise full of holes.
The initial scene describing someone’s first
experience of an IKEA store raises a smile but once trapped in his wardrobe and
shipped of on his journey (more silly than extraordinary) the fakir’s facility
for comic observation fades. Instead introspection grows as he bumps into both
refugees and celebrities on his whistle stop tour of Western Europe.
On none of the potential levels - humour,
satire or self-discovery – does the book really deliver. It is not laugh out
loud, the satire doesn’t bite, and the morality tale fails to convince.
If, as claimed, it was a number one best
seller in France then Guy De Maupassant, Emile Zola and Victor Hugo must be
turning in their literary graves. Or maybe it just lost something, or quite a
lot, in translation.
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