I'm Off And One Year

Description

"I'm off," says Felix Ferrer to his wife. "I'm leaving you." Thus Ferrer, a creature of appetite, impulse and habit, a man of our times, embarks on a journey to the extremes. After making for the frozen North Pole in pursuit of a rare cargo of Inuit artefacts, he is now back in his atelier in a Paris packed with ex-girlfriends, anxious artists and suspicious creditors, and beginning to feel very hot indeed...

JEAN ECHENOZ was born in Provence in 1947. He studied organic chemistry in Lille and then double bass in Metz before he turned to writing. He is one of the most influential French writers of his generation. He won, in 1999, the Prix Goncourt for his novel I'm Off. He is also the author of Piano.

Echenoz continues to throw custard pies at literary norms, in particular the machinery of your average novel. But the custartd itself is of a very high quality... An extraordinary book... a fresh and amazingly graceful way of looking at the world -- Giles Foden * Guardian * All the Pooterish school-boyish humour is perfectly caught by Guido Waldman's excellent translation, which paints a bleak landscape with verve and panache, dextrously juggling rueful nerdiness, cliche and slang without once putting a foot wrong. Here's the novel to pack for that springtime read -- Michele Roberts * Financial Times * Echenoz offers more delight in each paragraph than a shelf full of blockbusters * Scotsman * A sly mixture of intrigue, sexual observation and acid social commentary, created in an atmosphere of relentless suspicion * Daily Telegraph * Ironic, witty, detached, knowing and not unsympathetic... what makes this book so much fun is Echenoz' ability to create plausible characters who do slightly implausible things in familiar settings * Observer *