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Cheese

Cheese

by Willem Elsschot (Author)

  • Used

    Hardcover 2002

    $4.14
Synopsis

Cheese is a gentle, satirical fable of capitalism and wealth. A clerk in Antwerp suddenly becomes the chief agent in Belgium and Luxembourg for this red-rinded Dutch delight and is saddled with 370 cases containing ten thousand full-cream cheeses. But he has no idea how to run a business, or how to sell his goods, and he doesn't even like cheese. Steeped in the atmosphere of the 1930s, in a world full of smart operators and and failed businessmen, Cheese gracefully incorporates the rigid class divisions of the time and a man's obsession with status. It is as relevant in our age of Internet investors and dot.com failures as it was when it was written.

$4.14

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Quantity

1 in stock

More Information

Format: Hardcover
 Pages: 153
 Edition: First Edition
 Publisher: Granta Books
Published: 07 Feb 2002
ISBN 10: 186207481X
ISBN 13: 9781862074811

Media Reviews
'Edam's great moment in world literature' boasts the blurb on the back of this novella, and such a throwaway line encapsulates the charm of a book which has been compared to Three Men in a Boat or Diary of a Nobody. This gentle, deceptively simple Low Country comedy classic is about business and greed in particular, and life generally. Frans Laarmans, a humble shipping clerk, is suddenly elevated to the position of chief agent for a Dutch cheese company. The nemesis of an order for 10,000 full-cream cheeses faces him as his brusque employer is due to arrive, and Laarman begins to crack. Elsschot's achievement is to make the mundane and the trivial somehow significant to us all. Full of sly irony and gentle satire, this is one 'cheese' that has matured well since it first appeared in the 1930s.
Author Bio
Willem Elsschot (1882 - 1960) was the pseudonym of Alfons de Ridder, head of a successful advertising agency who, unbeknownst to his family, was a hugely successful novelist in his spare time. Cheese, his breakthrough novel, was first published in Dutch in 1933.