Customer Reviews

9.99: A Novel

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book gives a fairly good look behind the veil of an advertising agency by following the making and the release of, and the reaction on a commercial for a dairy product 'Madone' (the hint is obvious).
It depicts the cynical atmosphere with the ukases of the client, the personal ambitions and deceits, the lick and kick culture, the hire and fire policies, drugs and call-girls.
The ultimate ambition of the agency is to turn mankind into a product with a sell-by date and to create a world of unhappy, frustrated and insatiate consumers, because happy people don't consume.

The author was fired by the agency after the release of the book, because too many 'colleagues' recognized themselves in the characters of the book.

Unfortunately, the story of the production of the commercial is from time to time interrupted by less forceful tirades of obscenities, love lamentations and far too heavy (anti-capitalist) metaphors.

At the end the author has no illusions about the Home sapiens : 'there is no alternative for this world'.

This book is sometimes overstretched, but I recommend it as a good portrait of the marketing business, which is an essential part of our modern world.

Frederic Beigbeder writes a refreshing and witty observation of his life as an advertising creative. He wants out of his hyped and glossed over career and tries hard to get the boot from his life of money, women, fast cars and cocaine. A self inflicted, self pitying, loathsome, melodramatic and hilariously funny tale of one man's road to re-invention. It's a great read, especially if you have experience in the industry - you will identify with this novel immediately. A good laugh with critical undertones.

We all know that a consumer is someone who consumes and the main if not sole purpose of advertising is how to make you consume more. What the author shows is that the real trick they achieve is to make you thing that your desires to acquire things is a manifestation of your character, freedom and self-determination, while the truth is that you are just a mental eunuch trapped in a web of artificial needs created by "Inc, world" to ensure your permanent stupidity and annulment of individuality. However it does not seek to offer an alternative or an immunity pill, just to tell you that "such is life".

A great achievement in the rearguard action against global consumerism. There are plenty of echoes of Houellebecq's writing for those fans of his. And while the translation of the scenario from France to England is not pulled off very skilfully, the novel's fast pace and riotous depictions of the advertising world's excesses outweight any such minor flaws.

If you believe that the purpose of advertising is to tell you the truth and that you really are free to be original in how you dress and what you eat, then this book will be revealing to you.

If you are looking for good literature or to learn something about the advertising business and lifestyle, you will be dissappointed or confused at best. The story (and its storyetelling) is modelled after the same advertising the book talks about: It starts with a great promise, but it never delivers. This might be the secret message of the book. I found myself skipping pages to see if maybe something worth reading happens at the end. Well, it doesn't.

I am speechless - this is an amazing book.

In Beigbeder's 99F, (published in 2000, since renamed '14.99 Euros', English translation titled '9.99' and soon to be a major French motion picture), the main characters beat to death a retired woman in Miami (after telling her that the only reason that the Americans helped liberate France during WWII was to export more Coca-Cola) while on location for a TV ad shoot. The killers motive is that American pension funds are one of the main drivers behind globalisation. This book is not worth the paper it's printed on.