A wickedly funny novel about an American anti-hero.
Karoo is a professional fixer of other people's scripts and, by his own acknowledgement, he ruins them all. Calamity and comedy follows shambolic Saul Karoo as his life breaks down. He is a man prone to luck both good and bad, and when a young woman with a strange connection to his past shows up, the plot of his own life comes into sharp focus.
A wickedly funny novel about an American anti-hero.Oscar-winning writer Steve Tesich masterfully creates and destroys the sad, mad world of Saul Karoo.Karoo is an alcoholic who can't get drunk, a loving father who can't bear to be alone with his son, a fixer of film scripts who admits that he ruins every one of them.Calamity and comedy accompany Saul on his odyssey through sex, death and showbusiness as he seeks to 'fix' both a master director's greatest film and his own broken life at the same time.
“Karoo has all the ingredients of a truly great novel. Its plot has the pathos of a Greek tragedy and enough twists and turns to satisfy the most avid Raymond Chandler fan. The characters come alive as soon as they appear on the page. Fantastic”
Literary Review
Utterly wonderful... This novel does supremely what novels were invented to do - it confronts the most unbearable sadness with a comic exhilaration that makes you almost pleased that life is tragic -- Howard Jacobson
Mordantly funny, unexpectedly moving and brutally honest about the business of making movies -- Richard E Grant
Fascinating. A real satiric invention, loaded with wise outrage -- Arthur Miller
Terrific. Nakedly honest, a tour de force of self-destruction. As Saul spirals into free-fall we're with him all the way, because he's so furiously funny -- Deborah Moggach
In this second novel Steve Tesich has created an anti-hero as appealing as any dreamt up by Philip Roth or Saul Bellow Independent
Scathing, hilarious and glorious New York Times Book Review
Karoo is a very good and very funny novel of the old-fashioned American kind, the tragi-comic story - familiar from Philip Roth and JP Donleavy - of a selfish but vulnerable and oddly lovable monster whose own shortcomings don't disqualify him from saying some sharp things about the hypocrisies of the allegedly better-balanced types who despise him Herald
Adulterous alcoholic and pathological liar, it is, nevertheless, hard not to love Karoo, whose sardonic observations are both poignant and extremely funny. This is comic writing at its best. Clever, well crafted and proof that Tesich was master of the medium The Times
Brilliantly funny in its early chapters, but also very wise, the virtuosic irony turns to bitterness as a tragic story develops. Tesich died just after completing this marvellous, heart-felt valediction. Scotland on Sunday
Steve Tesich wrote many plays and screenplays, including the Academy Award-winning Breaking Away and The World According to Garp. His first novel, Summer Crossing, was published in 1982. He died in 1996 at the age of fifty-three.
This item is eligible for simple returns within 30 days of delivery. Return shipping is the responsibility of the customer. See our returns policy for further details.
