Cherokee

by Jean Echenoz

Book Overview

"Compelling and fresh." -- The New York Times Cherokee recounts the adventures of one George Chave, the proverbial innocent who, in his pursuit of love and the mysterious Jenny Weltmann, manages to... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0879236655
• Release Date: September 1994
• Publisher: David R. Godine, Publisher
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.4" x 0.9" x 5.7"

Customer Reviews

"One day a man came out of a shed."

This offbeat French novel (which won the Prix Médicis in 1983) is hard to pin down. It more or less follows the story of George Chave, a tall but otherwise nondescript middle-aged Parisian collector of jazz records. He lives off a meager inheritance until one day he meets a woman, falls in love, and discovers the need for greater income. This more or less leads him to a job at a very strange detective agency, where he is involved in searches for a rare missing parrot, a runaway wife, the heir to a great fortune, and becomes entangled in a weird cult. Along the way one meets geriatric booksellers, giant thugs, intrepid policemen, suspicious private eyes, a homicidal cousin, actors and actresses, an odd Englishmen, a police informer, and several others. That, in a nutshell, explains what's wrong with the book-there are too many characters in too small a space and keeping track of everyone's agendas gets to be rather a chore. However, the prose is both dry and humorous, and worth reading for its' own sake. You have to love a book that starts with, "One day a man came out of a shed."