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The Adventures of Mr Marigold, Michael Tobias's 30th book, a modest tale, is nearest in nuance and thinking to the Middle Ages' voyage extraordinaire genre, to utopian realism of the Renaissance, and to 1930s French existentialism.
The Adventures of Mr Marigold is a groundbreaking fiction - it is at once eloquent, complex, wry, disturbing and forever enchanting. It speaks volumes to the 21st century. Ferociously ambitious, it is little wonder that a work, with major chapters set in New Zealand, should be published in a country internationally noted for its "100% Pure" superlatives - New Zealand's great wines and unprecedented scenery; the biggest gorilla, more sheep, bungee jumpers, sail boats and tattoos per capita than any other country; prolific filmmakers, painters, poets and literateurs, explorers, mountain climbers; and, sadly, its high rate of species extinctions.
Tobias, who in addition to his many other books, has also written, directed and/or produced over 100 films. He is an internationally-renowned author and ecologist and has worked in over 50 countries. However, he feels most poetically at home in New Zealand, where his long-time friendship with Craig Potton - many of whose photographs illustrate the novel - has blossomed into this stunning collaboration.
The Adventures of Mr Marigold, set in near contemporary times, concerns the unabashedly exuberant destiny of an unlikely ensemble of characters. Each is afflicted, in dazzling turns, with that incurable and infectious disease known as 'trying to save the world' - something that many of us think about, but too few actually embark upon.
This literary expedition is a tour de force of radical topography, geopolitical hi-jinks, and erotic chivalries. Consider just some of the novel's relentless cartography:
*From the heights of Ecuador, to a rusticated New Mexico * Hong Kong engulfed in avian flu * a search for the Moa in New Zealand * an experiment in Antarctica * pirates amongst the remote Chagos and Maldives island chains * a tumultuous odyssey across India * a lost tribe in Tibet * a legendary saint in snowy Trafalgar Square * a mythic pyramid off the coast of Ireland * an insane asylum beneath a shopping mall in Los Angeles * an active Mount Vesuvius * a secret summit meeting in La Mancha of the world's 400 billionaires * a moribund Andorra * an astrogeophysicist's haunt in the never-before described foggy mountains off the coast of Yemen * Mercury (or the Moon) in a fatal collision course with Earth * a deadly nunatak in 'Greenlandia' * an abandoned wizard's tower in Hungary, site of a millennial, scientific chaos * a desperate trek across an unexplored Central Africa * and, a mythical oceanic archipelago at the origins of all genotypes somewhere a few thousand miles south of the hurricane-engulfed Canary Islands...
Pages: 1836
Format: Hardcover, with dustjacket
ISBN 1-877333-09-3
NZ SHOP for NEW ZEALAND BOOKS and other NEW ZEALAND GIFTS
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