A walker in NY City...

[lsanderson]

A Literary Visitor Strolls in From the Airport
By CHARLES McGRATH

Will Self’s new novel, “The Book of Dave” (Bloomsbury USA), is about a London cabdriver who inadvertently founds a religion when a ranting diatribe he buries in the garden of his ex-wife is dug up five centuries later, in a now post-apocalyptic world, and becomes a sacred text. Mr. Self’s own text is immensely learned in cabbie lore and even creates a cab-based “Clockwork Orange”-like language, in which the sun is the “foglamp,” for example, and the moon an “édlite.”

When Mr. Self recently traveled to New York, however, he did not take a taxi from his house in South London to Heathrow. He walked the whole 26 miles. Upon arriving in New York, he walked from Kennedy Airport to the nearby Crowne Plaza Hotel — a journey more perilous than he expected, because it involved a nighttime traverse of expressways with no curbs.

The next morning Mr. Self, who is unusually tall and very thin and has a long, melancholy face that he once described as looking “like a bag full of genitals,” packed his knapsack, rolled a cigarette and, puffing from a Hunter Thompson-style cigarette holder, set off on foot for Manhattan. More

Comments

[danae.livejournal.com]

I read that article and the premise of his book sounds fascinating so I want to read it.

[boywhocantsayno.livejournal.com]

Will Self’s new novel, “The Book of Dave” (Bloomsbury USA), is about a London cabdriver who inadvertently founds a religion when a ranting diatribe he buries in the garden of his ex-wife is dug up five centuries later, in a now post-apocalyptic world, and becomes a sacred text.

Didn't Walter Miller, Jr. do this story about 50 years ago? Mind you, in A Canticle For Leibowitz it was a shopping list, but still...