The Ally - A Novel

Informationen zum Autor Iván Repila worked in advertising, graphic design, and publishing before turning to writing with his highly acclaimed debut novel, Despicable Comedy . His second novel, The Boy Who Stole Attila’s Horse , was his first to appear in English. Repila’s work is celebrated in his homeland of Spain and praised for its originality and depth, and has been translated into more than fifteen languages.   Mara Faye Lethem is an award-winning translator of contemporary Catalan and Spanish prose, and the author of A Person’s a Person, No Matter How Small . Her recent translations include books by Patricio Pron, Max Besora, Javier Calvo, Marta Orriols, Toni Sala, Alicia Kopf, and Irene Solà. She is currently translating the collected short stories of Pere Calders. Klappentext "In this unexpectedly hilarious social novel, a misguided thirty-something tries to beat his girlfriend at her own game: becoming the ultimate feminist. When he first meets Najwa at a lecture by Siri Hustvedt-whom he's never read-our hero discovers a whole new world of feminist thought. Determined to impress her, he sets out sincerely on his journey to allyship. His mother confides in him about the dreams she had to sacrifice because of the patriarchy, and he laments the violence and oppression women face. But he can't help but notice that they're going about their activism the wrong way... So our hero does what any good ally should: he gathers the worst of the macho men in town and begins a campaign to provoke the feminists. By "putting them in their place" with this phallic club-pelting demonstrators with raw eggs, posting obscene, threatening manifestos-he's convinced he can make women understand, and get them to fight harder for the cause. Following him as his plan spectacularly fails, The Ally mixes humor, clever storytelling, and hard-core feminist theory to lampoon the macho superiority complex and our modern gender wars"-- Leseprobe 0 I’m the most feminist guy you’ll ever meet. But sure, I have my contradictions. Right now, for example, my five roommates and I are throwing eggs at a group of naked and semi-naked women demonstrating in front of city hall. The first two flew past the mark, but the next ones make a perfect impact on the face and tits of the women holding up the main sign. I see our eggs flying in slow motion, describing a lovely arc from down to up and up to down, until they break and become sticky snot, natural and devoid of beauty, and I think about David’s slingshot and the outline drawn in the air by the stone before it inflamed the flesh and separated the cartilage from Goliath’s bone, and I can’t help but think how right I am when I say that there’s something platonic about violence. “The one with the waxed pussy is really hot,” says Hugo. I can’t say exactly what the reason is for the protest, because I’ve been attending these kinds of events for too many weeks now and I confuse the plots, and of course my roommates don’t know either, so I don’t know who or what I’m throwing eggs at. It could be my mother or my girlfriend. Or my sister. One of my grandmothers is dead. The riot police stationed amid the demonstration and the counterdemonstration start getting nervous when three hundred grams of yolk tint a blonde woman’s hair orange, but we’re protected by the crowd and still have a dozen ovoid grenades in our pockets, so we stick to the plan. “We won’t stop until there are none left,” we’d said. I’ll admit throwing eggs isn’t an original idea. Pathetic, even, when compared to other forms of urban guerrilla warfare in vogue at the time, but it’s easy for me to convince the team: eggs are cheap, easy to get and to hide; they aren’t a serious enough offense to get us in real legal trouble; and, above all, they represent male virility, our balls, our huevos . You don’t want balls, right? Well, here are ours, I think I said....

Product details

• Authors: Mara Faye Lethem, Ivan Repila, Iván Repila
• Publisher: Other press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 13.12.2022
• EAN: 9781635422542
• ISBN: 978-1-63542-254-2
• No. of pages: 272
• Dimensions: 132 mm x 202 mm x 18 mm
• Subject: Fiction > Comic, cartoon, humour, satire