Silent Extras

Description

The second novel from the wunderkind of Dutch literature Ewald, Broccoli and the exotic Elvira are three young friends on the run - from the horrifying possibility of living mundane lives. They all want just one thing - to be magnificent, on screen or off it, but ideally in front of thousands of people. So Broccoli, self-styled svengali and 'President of the Society of Geniuses', begins Operation Brando, an insanely ambitious plan to make them the biggest stars Hollywood has ever known.Sadly, things don't quite follow this plan and their path to global obscurity is by turns hilarious, absurd and tragic. Operation Brando begins badly and gets rapidly worse- Broccoli is only able to secure auditions for his disciples as extras in risible youth theatre productions and lousy commercials. He thinks Ewald would be perfect for the non-speaking role of a spotty kid, for instance, who has only to fall down stairs to get the part, but even this stretches Ewald's talents a little too far. All three suffer badly from the burning need to be somebody else, somebody none of them are quite able to be, and this focus on the abyss separating desire and reality makes for a richly comic and ultimately moving novel by one of Europe's most exciting young authors.

Arnon Grunberg (Author) Arnon Grunberg was born in Amsterdam in 1971. He was kicked out of school at seventeen and started his own publishing company, specializing in non-Aryan German literature, at the age of nineteen. His first novel, Blue Mondays, written at the age of twenty-three, became a bestseller in Europe, won the Anton Wachter Prize. His second novel, Silent Extras was similarly successful, and Phantom Pain, his third, won the AKO Prize, the Dutch Booker Prize. Writing under the name Marek van der Jagt, Grunberg published The History of My Baldness, which won him the Anton Wachter Prize for the second time, a prize for the best debut novel of the last two years. He is the only novelist in the history of this prize to have won it twice. Arnon Grunberg lives in New York City.