Hunters and Gatherers: A Novel

by Geoff Nicholson

Overview

Steve Geddes is writing about collectors and collecting. His research introduces him to people obsessed by many things, including cars, beer-cans, tape-recordings and jokes. Geddes also gets himself involved in a quest to find a cult novelist.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781468303605
Publisher:	Abrams
Publication date:	07/01/1995
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	598 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Geoff Nicholson is the author of twenty books, including Sex Collectors, Hunters and Gatherers, The Food Chain, and Bleeding London, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize. He divides his time between Los Angeles and London.

Editorial Reviews

British satirist Nicholson's 1991 novel describes a writer commissioned to write a book about collectors and the various eccentrics he encounters during the course of his research. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The wacky manic collectors in this raunchy little novel, first published in Great Britain in 1991, collect all manner of things: bad jokes; unrelated bits of ency-clopedic minutiae; sounds, including sexual indelicacies and death rattles; imaginary beer cans; women's knickers; classic cars, and the men who collect classic cars. The narrator, Steve Geddes, is a writer doing a book on collectors, especially those with "unlikely, bizarre, or exceptionally useless collections." His research leads him to the Havergals, a wealthy, eccentric couple. They "collect people"; that is, she does the "collecting" while he watches-"a bout of troilism," as Geddes calls it. By accident, Geddes learns that reclusive "cult author" Thornton McCain may have written a book that Geddes hasn't heard of. Geddes the observer becomes both obsessed collector and, for the randy Havergals, object to be collected. An insightful delight from start to finish; recommended for all fiction collections.-Ron Antonucci, Hudson Lib. & Historical Soc., Ohio

Library Journal

British wit Nicholson's "The Food Chain" earned him an appreciative audience on both sides of the Atlantic. The title of his newest, clever, and very funny novel seems to continue an interest in food and consumption, but it actually refers to the art, or obsession, of collecting. Nicholson's hapless protagonist is Steve Geddes, a self-described "moderate failure" and would-be writer. He has actually managed to get a decent advance for a book about collectors but is finding the research rather depressing. One man claims to have the world's greatest collection of beer cans, but they all seem to have disappeared. A dour comedian has a collection of a half million stale jokes, and a blase and wealthy couple collect classic cars and sex partners. As the plot twists and writhes with unexpected developments and bizarre coincidences, Steve succumbs to writer's block and dismay over people's attempts to bring meaning and order into their lives through acquisition. Roguish yet shrewd, Nicholson has some thought-provoking things to say about the chameleon-like nature of stories and the difficulty of knowing what to make of one's life.

Donna Seaman

Clever, entertaining, and intriguing. -- New York Times Book Review

Eric Kraft

Delightful...a charming testament to the ordering influences of art. -- The New York Times

Michiko Kakutani

Hunters and Gatherers [is] a fabulously entertaining novel that anybody looking for a little meaning in his or her life should read, and then weep.

Sean Sullivan