A Dancing Bear [Paperback]

David Free (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 14, 2007

What if getting the girl meant becoming a terrorist wet boy? On an unnamed university campus late in the 20th century, a young man named Fenton Bland joins a society of student Maoists in order to get near the girl he loves. But the girl turns out to belong to the chief Maoist - and HE turns out to harbor alarming aspirations in the field of revolutionary terror. And so Fenton, wearing a forcibly grown beard, finds himself propelled into a bizarre covert world of death lists, backyard bomb labs, untraceable handguns, and attempted wet jobs of wildly varying quality - a world in which he must choose between losing the girl forever or else participating, perhaps very soon, in a successful terrorist atrocity ...

Product Details

• Paperback: 328 pages
• Publisher: Lulu.com (June 14, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1430320540
• ISBN-13: 978-1430320548
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,014,583 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Great Novel & A Great Read, July 11, 2007

By 

Etan Ben-Ami "Etan" (New York) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: A Dancing Bear (Paperback)

I first ran into "A Dancing Bear" as a podcast novel. After several weeks during which I annoyed my fellow commuters with outbursts of laughter, I started reading it on the web. This led to printing out chapters and circulating them samiszdat-style among my co-workers. They went on to annoy people on their daily commutes. It's been spreading like a virus. The least I can do is to buy a copy and encourage you to do the same.

Like all really great comic novels, "A Dancing Bear" is actually a philosophical novel in disguise. It's a coming of age story set in a world, ours, where idiocy has become celebrated as art and philosophy. It skewers post-modernism, radical politics, political correctness, the slacker lifestyle and practically everything else its hero encounters. More important, it's a celebration of humanity and hard-won wisdom. It's worth noting that David Free loves language, and he does things with it that few can. If you loved reading James Joyce's Ulysses or Italo Svevo's Confessions of Zeno, you're going to love this book also.

"A Dancing Bear" was the web's greatest unpublished novel. It's finally been published, and you owe it to yourself and the author to buy a copy. Help keep David Free writing. I'm sure that you'll find yourself, like me, waiting for his next book. Hurry up, David!

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Absolutely Delightful, July 22, 2007

By 

Devon Kappa (New England, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Dancing Bear (Paperback)

Poor Fenton Bland. His life at college is rapidly spiraling out of control. It's bad enough that he's stuck in the class of Professor Ivan Lego, whose theory of socioliterology -- the concept that any writing is wrongfully oppressive because "it owes its very existence to a foundational act of suppression, namely, the suppression of non-language" -- is taking the academic world by storm. It's even worse that he's inadvertently given Pamela, a student activist with whom Fenton shares a deep, dark shame, the idea to strike a blow for the disenfranchised by campaigning for the release of a notorious serial killer. Still worse, Fenton's relationship with his lesbian faux-vegetarian deadbeat housemates is worse than ever (not least because of the dead cat). But worst of all is that the student Maoist group that Fenton joined solely for the purpose of getting close to the beautiful Charmaine is singularly focused on announcing itself by assassinating someone, and Fenton is stuck right in the middle of the plot.

Don't worry if you don't have a good sense of what "Maoists" are. Neither do I. Nor, for that matter, do the members of the Maoist group. And that, in a nutshell, is what makes Mark Osher's delightful A Dancing Bear such a spot-on primer to the college experience. It's all there: the students whose big plans and grand statements are undermined by their own lack of understanding (and ability). The academics whose outré theories are driven by self-promotion rather than genuine relevance. The everyman stuck in the middle, trying to do what is right but restrained by his own passivity. And, of course, the university public bathrooms (waiting for you at the start of Chapter 25).

A Dancing Bear is consistently hilarious, combining effective satire of academic, political and individual pomposity with regular moments of slapstick, laugh-out-loud humor. However, equally impressive is the novel's philosophical heart. For all of its worthwhile silliness, A Dancing Bear also is concerned with deeper questions that confront all collegians, and, for that matter, all thinking people. Can I steer my life where I want it to go? Or am I locked in to a path set by outside forces or simple inertia? What would it take to change my life? A Dancing Bear seamlessly works these weighty themes into its rollicking tale, ultimately proving satisfying on many levels.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Funniest novel ever?, July 8, 2007

By 

Thom Cutler "Aussie Highbrow" (Brisbane, Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Dancing Bear (Paperback)

I first read "A Dancing Bear" when it was a free online novel, said to have been written by the shadowy - and possibly non-existent - Mark Osher. I've since read it three more times, and forking out $20 U.S. to get my hands on the print version was a no-brainer for me. I just *had* to have it on my shelf. This is one of those all-too-rare books that make you laugh out loud. It rivals another campus novel, "Lucky Jim," as the most consistently funny novel I've ever read. It contains lines and characters that will stay with you forever. There is the book's hapless protagonist Fenton Bland, who joins a society of student Maoists in a misguided attempt to impress the girl he loves. There is Gus, the passionate but incompetent Maoist supremo obsessed with planning and perpetrating a successful terrorist strike. (When a junior Maoist proposes a car bombing, Gus responds: "I'm listening, provided you're not referring to my Kombi.") There is the belligerent student agitator Pamela Scratch, whom Fenton may or may not have sexually interfered with when they were both five, and who is presently committed to liberating a "patently guilty" serial killer named Neville Aggot. There is the liberally tattooed figure of Aggot himself. There are Fenton's housemates, "the tag-team champions of domestic sloth," and their psychopathic cat Streetwise. Lovers of the website should note that there are a few minor differences between the HTML text and this book version. For example, when I first read the web version, Fenton's next-door neighbour looked like Lee Van Cleef. Now he is an "ageing doppelganger of Ed Lauter." One last note: be warned that this novel's humour is pretty dark, and occasionally verges on the obscene. If you're likely to be offended by some of the earthier terms in the Australian lexicon, this is not the book for you.