Erik Martiny - With its playful, manic prose and delightful self-referentiality, 'The Pleasures of Queueing' is a caffeinated Tristram Shandy for the globalist era
Erik Martiny, The Pleasures of Queueing, Mastodon, 2018.
He aspires to solitude and sobriety. His parents thrive on exuberance and the production of babies on an industrial scale.
When Olaf Montcocq emerges from the plush seclusion of his mother’s uterus in the early 1970s, his parents turn out to be a good deal more than he bargained for. His mother Anne is an ultra-Catholic, alt-feminist Irishwoman and Martin his father a disturbingly eccentric Frenchman convinced that the Second World War is a moveable feast. But Olaf’s predicament doesn’t stop there. Anne’s beliefs make her staunchly anti-contraception and Martin happens to be unstoppably oversexed. Before long, Olaf is surrounded by a horde of bickering siblings that make queueing for basic amenities an inescapable feature of his life. By the time he starts to compose the Great Franco-Irish Family Chronicle, Olaf discovers that attempting to put pen to paper in a household of twenty plus children is about as easy as trying to con…
He aspires to solitude and sobriety. His parents thrive on exuberance and the production of babies on an industrial scale.
When Olaf Montcocq emerges from the plush seclusion of his mother’s uterus in the early 1970s, his parents turn out to be a good deal more than he bargained for. His mother Anne is an ultra-Catholic, alt-feminist Irishwoman and Martin his father a disturbingly eccentric Frenchman convinced that the Second World War is a moveable feast. But Olaf’s predicament doesn’t stop there. Anne’s beliefs make her staunchly anti-contraception and Martin happens to be unstoppably oversexed. Before long, Olaf is surrounded by a horde of bickering siblings that make queueing for basic amenities an inescapable feature of his life. By the time he starts to compose the Great Franco-Irish Family Chronicle, Olaf discovers that attempting to put pen to paper in a household of twenty plus children is about as easy as trying to con…
