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The Savage Girl [Secure eReader (recommended)/Microsoft Reader/Adobe]
eBook by Alex Shakar
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eBook Category: Mainstream
eBook Description:  E-book exclusive special feature: This PerfectBound eBook contains "Virtualism," an essay on consumerism in a wired time--written especially by the author to help to encourage you to buy this eBook.
Every product has this paradoxical essence. Two opposing desires it can promise to satisfy simultaneously. The job of a marketer is to cultivate this schismatic core, this broken soul, at the center of every product.
In the wake of her sister Ivy's widely publicized suicide attempt, Urusula Van Urden arrives in the metropolis of Middle City with hopes of starting her own life anew. In an attempt to understand the events leading up to her sister's breakdown, Ursula meets Ivy's mysterious boyfriend, Chas Lacouture, and joins his trendspotting firm, Tomorrow, Ltd. Armed with only a sketch pad and the mandate to "find the future," she begins an odyssey into the strangely intoxicating world of trendspotting where one lesson prevails: At the heart of every product lies a paradox, and when cultivated successfully, it yields untold riches. As Ivy's delusions grow stronger and more apocalyptic, Ursula's observations of a filthy, rodent-eating homeless girl-an urban savage--lead to an elaborate advertising scheme gone awry that has unexpected consequences.
The Savage Girl is a razor-sharp and mesmerizing first novel, a satire that cracks the whip on the zeitgeist and takes a wicked look at the dark side of contemporary consumer culture.
eBook Publisher: Harper Collins, Inc./PerfectBound, Published: 2001
Fictionwise Release Date: June 2002
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Available eBook Formats [Secure eReader (recommended)/Microsoft Reader/Adobe - What's this?]: SECURE MICROSOFT READER FORMAT [358 KB] - Requires Microsoft Reader 2.1.1 for PCs, or Microsoft Reader 2.2.2 on Pocket PC 2002 handheld devices. Some older Pocket PCs can be upgraded. Learn More., SECURE EREADER (RECOMMENDED) FORMAT [327 KB], SECURE ADOBE FORMAT [1.1 MB], OEBFF Format (IMP) [694 KB]
Secure Adobe: Printing enabled, Read-aloud DISABLED
Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED
Adobe Acrobat Reader ISBN: 0060086912
Microsoft Reader ISBN: 0060086904
eReader (recommended) ISBN: 0060097213
MobiPocket Reader ISBN: 9780060770556
 
"An exceptionally smart and likable first novel that tries valiantly to ransom Beauty from its commercial captors."--Jonathan Franzen
"Alex Shakar's prose meets the severest demands of twentieth-century modernism. . . .What thrills me beyond the pleasure of his magical metamorphosis of contemporary reality is that so young a writer should so seriously be creating a language charged with what Nabokov called ?the aesthetic vibrancy of authentic literature."--Zulfikar Ghose "Shakar's clever and provocative debut novel is something of a genre bender ... Into this comic-book-setting, full of vividly drawn, outsized characters, Shakar drops a perfectly normal heroine, Ursula Van Urden ... What's best about this entertaining novel is the feast of ideas. Has too much irony been emitted into the earth's atmosphere? Is glamour a zero-sum game? Is there a paradoxical essence at the heart of every product? Who knows. But Shakar makes it fun to contemplate ... The ultra-gloss anxieties of young urbanites are on fetching display in this clever debut."--Publishers Weeekly
Stitching The savage girl kneels on the paving stones of Banister Park, stitching together strips of brown and gray pelt with elliptical motions of her bare arm. The sleeves and sides of her olive-drab T-shirt are cut out, exposing her flanks and opposed semicircles of sunburned back, like the cauterized stumps of wings. A true redskin, more so than any Indian ever was, her skin more red than brown. It must have been pale once. And her Mohican is whitish blond, her eyes blue or possibly green. Her pants are from some defunct Eastern European army, laden with pockets, cut off at the knees. Her shins are wrapped in bands of pelt, a short brown fur. Her feet are shod in moccasins. There is a metal barb about the size of a crochet needle stuck through her earlobe, and a length of slender chain hangs from her scalp, affixed in four places to isolated lockets of hair. Each time the girl bends forward to make a stitch, her tattered shirt drapes and reveals her breasts, full and pendulous, whereas the rest of her is lean and unyielding. Down the bench, the man with the greased hair and mustache and forty-ounce beer, and his friend, the man with the Afro and mustache and forty-ounce beer, watch the ebb and flow of her flesh with sleepy smiles, lulled by the savage girl's mysterious, eye-of-the-hurricane calm, while around her the rest of the park gyres and caterwauls with trick bikers, hat dancers, oil-can drummers, chinchillas, rats, drunks, kendo fighters, shadowboxers, soccer players, a couple of cardsharpers, and, of course, one trendspotter, Ursula Van Urden, who has been circling the savage girl all morning, moving from bench to bench to get a better view, trying to work up the nerve to speak to her but unable to rid herself of the ridiculous idea that the girl simply won't understand, that she communicates only by means of whistles, clicks of the tongue, or tattoos stamped out on the cobblestones, and that even this rudimentary language she reserves solely for communing with the spirits that toss in the rising steam of hot-dog and pretzel carts. Copyright © 2001 by Alex Shakar
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