Olivier Bourdeaut

Warning: contains spoilers

A young boy recounts his childhood growing up with parents who suffer from alcoholism and severe mental illness.

This book is a tedious, unpleasant, and severely disturbing read.

A couple meet, unofficially marry, travel, and settle down to a madcap existence in Paris. Eventually, they have a son who becomes the ultimate victim of their deranged lunacy.

In the book, the son is fed sporadically, sometimes not receiving anything but olives in the middle of the night. He frequently misses school, and eventually is yanked from school completely.

At home, he participates in his parents' wild and irresponsible behaviors. He is given alcohol, cigarettes, and is subjected to endless nights of drunken orgies in his home.

He is often used by his father’s best friend to lure & incapacitate young women so the best friend can sexually assault them. Copying what he sees around him, he is even described as luring a young woman into his own bedroom so he can bounce around naked on the bed in front of her. I guess this sort of shocking behavior should not be surprising since the French president himself is married to his own sexual predator. This book makes it abundantly clear that blasé French attitudes toward pedophilia, sexual abuse, and sexual assault are way too normalized. It just leaves a really sleazy residue on the book that is impossible to rinse off.

Eventually, the parents’ out of control lifestyle begins to catch up with them. The mother sets the apartment on fire and is committed to a lunatic asylum. The fire and years of unpaid taxes cause the family to lose the apartment. Unable to endure the structure of the asylum, the mother convinces her husband to ‘kidnap’ her and take her away. The family escapes to their rural Spanish villa & the parents ultimately and unsurprisingly kill themselves. While the son, who is naturally already beginning to show signs of mental illness himself, is left alone with the father’s lecherous best friend.

A couple of descriptions I have read refer to this book as ‘whimsical’; I fail to see any whimsy at all. Creepy & disconcerting are the best adjectives I can come up with.

Overall, the book just strives to shock the reader by treating all of its debauchery as hilariously funny, which is just gross.

And the endless, goofily rhyming sentences that take over as the book progresses are mind-numbingly obnoxious.

The book does shine an interesting spotlight on the disparity between rich and poor. Any poor, or even middle class, family like this would have had their child taken away immediately by the authorities; but, because the protagonists of this novel are wealthy and have somewhat influential connections, their disturbing behavior and child abuse are depicted as 'quirky & eccentric’. At the end of the day, no matter how atrociously they behave, they retain custody of their son. And I don’t think it is a coincidence that the mother is institutionalized only AFTER the family has suffered a reversal of fortune and lost some of their money.

Waiting for Bojangles is a simply atrocious book, undeserving of its misleadingly jovial title.… (more)

En pojke växer upp med en mamma som byter namn varje dag, en pappa som älskar att ljuga ihop historier och en trana som husdjur. Föräldrarna älskar att dansa och allra helst till Nina Simones ?Mister Bojangles?. De har vänt vuxenansvar och konventioner ryggen för att göra varje dag till ett äventyr. Men när skatteverket knackar på dörren och deras tillvaro riskerar gå om intet, glider mamman över
gränsen till galenskap och blir intagen. Pappan och sonen kokar då ihop en storartad plan för att frita henne och få sitt gamla liv tillbaka.… (more)

Wenn es ginge, würde ich diesem Buch sechs Sterne geben, dabei ist es schwer, in Worte zu fassen, warum.

Es ist poetisch, eindringlich, lustig, traurig, verrückt, wundervoll -- mir fehlen die Adjektive.
Es ist ein Büchlein (aber schön ausgestattet, sogar mit Lesebändchen), und jede/r sollte die Zeit finden, es zu lesen. Am Besten igelt man sich für ein paar Stunden ein und taucht ab. Aber Achtung: man sollte sich nicht nur mit Getränken, sondern auch mit Taschentüchern ausrüsten. Man wird sie brauchen, und das nicht nur wegen des Verlaufes, den die Geschichte nimmt, sondern weil sie einfach zum heulen schön ist.
Ich werde gar nicht versuchen, den Inhalt zu beschreiben, denn man kann diese Achterbahn der Gefühle sowieso nicht in Worte fassen.
Es fängt recht lustig an, und irgendwie ist es auch verrückt, aber dann mehren sich die ernsten Momente, bis man zu dem Punkt kommt, wo man Böses ahnt, und die Luft anhält... Trotzdem war ich auf das Ende nicht vorbereitet. Vielleicht hätte ich es den Andeutungen entnehmen können, und unterbewusst habe ich es auch gemacht, aber ich wollte es nicht wissen.
Tja, und da saß ich dann mit verweinten Augen -- und ich bin nicht der sentimentale Typ.
Es ist aber alles so realistisch beschrieben, auch wenn es so grotesk wirkt. Ich habe ähnliche Situationen in meinem Leben erlebt, vielleicht ging es mir deswegen so unter die Haut.
Egal, welche Genres man gerne liest, dies ist ein Buch das sicher jeden ansprechen wird.


Ich habe die Ausgabe im festen Einband gelesen, für das Rezensionsexemplar danke ich dem Piper Verlag.… (more)

This is a first novel by french writer Olivier Bourdeaut, which won a 'Prix du Roman Des Étudiants and so could be considered a novel for young adults. It also won the Grand Prix RTL-Lire (2016) which is an award for a French language novel chosen by a jury of readers and so it has wide appeal. It is the story of a family of three: the two parents and their young son, who act out a fairly bizarre life style. It is told from the POV of the son, but also from notes for an unpublished novel written by his father.

It starts with the son describing a typical day in the life of the family. His father has retired early from a position in the French Government and his wife and he seem to be acting out a sort of fantasy life. Every day his father invents a new name for his wife to whom he is devoted. She loves the attention and plays along, she is addicted to the dance and to a lesser extent to alcohol. Every day the couple dance to the NIna Simone recording of Mr Bojangles which is a focal point of their day. The father is spending his free time writing a novel and their son fits himself into their life which is also shared with a large African bird of the parrot family. They have a chateau across the border in Spain where they spend some holiday time and a senator from the fathers old working life attaches himself to the crazy family life style. The son of course is doing badly in school, but the parents are so wrapped up in themselves they hardly notice. They seem oblivious to the world outside and although they have a circle of oddball friends we realise that things are not quite right: they hardly ever open any post and leave their mail in a heap in their hall, their alcohol consumption is on the increase and they are starting to alienate some of their friends with their behaviour. The tax man arrives with an enormous bill that they cannot pay.........,

The bizarre behaviour points to some sort of mental illness and it is no surprise when this becomes an issue. However it is a romance first and foremost: a mad love affair that takes two people and their son (and a parrot) down a road that is never going to end well. There is nothing new here in the story telling, the novel starts off as a comedy and then becomes more of a bizarre fantasy acted out by a family seemingly bent on destruction. The tone of the novel is melancholic rather than tragic and a suspension of belief is required from the reader. By having the son tell the majority of the story enhances the mystery through his naive approach to his family. The notes of his father's unpublished writing are cleverly interwoven to provide some background. The comedy, the romance all tinged with a certain melancholy as the novel progresses, supplies the charm and probably the popularity of this first novel. 3 stars.… (more)