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Enter the Aardvark
- Narrated by: Matt Amendt
- Length: 5 hrs and 39 mins
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Publisher's Summary
A young congressman discovers a mysterious stuffed aardvark on his doorstep and sets out on a journey to find out what it means in this "weird, wonderful" novel about the secrets we keep from ourselves and their history-shaping consequences (Esquire).
It's early one morning on a hot day in August, and millennial congressman Alexander Paine Wilson (R), planning his first reelection campaign and in deep denial about his sexuality, receives a mysterious, over-sized FedEx delivery on his front stoop. Inside is a gigantic taxidermied aardvark.
This outrageous, edge-of-your-seat novel hurtles between contemporary Washington, DC, where Wilson tries to get rid of the unsightly beast before it destroys his career, and Victorian England - where we meet Titus Downing, the taxidermist who stuffed the aardvark, and Richard Ostlet, the naturalist who hunted her. Our present world, we begin to see, has been shaped in profound and disturbing ways by the secret that binds these men.
At once a ghost story, a love story, and a stunningly prescient political satire, Enter the Aardvark confronts the consequences of repressed male love meeting oppressive male power, and is a searing condemnation of our current American blindness. It is also that rarest of creatures: a work of art so utterly original and masterfully built that it seems to have spring fully formed from its visionary maker's head.
What the critics say
"Jessica Anthony is a writer possessed of mind-bending talents." (Heidi Julavits, author of The Folded Clock)
"Enter the Aardvark is one wild ride: a condemnation, a haunting, a song of love, a madcap political thriller - and it is absolutely unputdownable. I have long been a massive fan of Jessica Anthony's writing and this novel cements her as one of our most thrilling and singular innovators on the page. Welcome, readers, to her world." (Laura van den Berg, author of The Third Hotel)
"If you've been wondering, as I have, where the spirit of Nathanael West might be in these berserk and awful times, enter Jessica Anthony. With her highly inventive, ever attentive, and morally serious (as all great comedy must be) Enter the Aardvark, she estranges all over again our deplorable political moment, and thereby helps make it bearable." (Joshua Ferris, author of The Dinner Party and Then We Came to the End)
What listeners say about Enter the Aardvark
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Jackie
- 2020-06-25
offbeat, shrewd and hilarious political satire
loved this!! wasn’t sure what to make of it for a while but once you get into it, you’re strapped in and along for the ride...
the parallel narratives of congressman wilson and the taxidermist make for a well wrought tale equal in sense as nonsense. anthony’s writing is sharp and virtuosic, and endlessly entertaining. the use of second person is really clever and vaguely disturbing in wilson’s parts. in forcing us to become uncomfortably intimate with wilson, we, the reader consuming this are our inside the “skin of the enemy,” referencing the aardvark’s Namibian origins and ethos. really loved that. as funny a satire as this is, it also contains sincere, heartfelt tragedy, and explores the genuinely profound.
wasn’t sure what i was getting into when i started this, but i’m really happy i read this book!
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