The Extraordinary Journey of the Fakir who got Trapped in an Ikea Wardrobe
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- £2.99
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- £2.99
Publisher Description
Armed only with a counterfeit 100-Euro note, Ajatashatru the fakir arrives in Paris. His mission? To acquire a splendid new bed of nails. His destination? IKEA.
Once there he finds an obliging wardrobe in which to lay his head, only to discover on waking that he is locked in and headed for England in the back of a truck.
So begins a magnificent adventure for the intrepid fakir as he travels to Italy in a suitcase, writes a novel on a shirt, flees a revenge-crazed taxi driver, flies to Libya in a hot air balloon and finds love in the unlikeliest of places…
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
French author Pu rtolas's first novel to be translated stateside is a farcical tale with a dark underbelly. Indian fakir Ajatashatru Oghash Rathod gets into trouble when he travels to France to buy a new bed of nails (named hertsy rb k, in a pun) at a Parisian Ikea. Rathod decides to spend the night at the furniture store, trying out beds like Goldilocks and dining on leftover Swedish food. His idyll is soon interrupted by a group of employees; seeking refuge in a wardrobe, Rathod is bubble-wrapped and shipped out, entering not Narnia but a claustrophobic world of illegal immigrants. Pu rtolas delights in wordplay and gets plenty of mileage out of (mis-)pronunciations of the fakir's name ("A-jar-of-rat-stew-oh-gosh!" morphs into "A-jackal-that-ate-you"), as well as the ridiculous lexicon of Ikea furniture. This wordplay runs alongside the stark reality of the refugees, people whose "only mistake was to have been born on the wrong side of the Mediterranean." Grumpy border agents shunt them from one place to another, seeing only problems, not humanity, crammed into the world's tiniest spaces. A manic yet incisive satire.
