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Salmon Fishing in the Yemen
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Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (2007)

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Fiction. Literature. Humor (Fiction.) HTML:

An unassuming scientist takes an unbelievable adventure in the Middle East in this "extraordinary" novelâ??the inspiration for the major motion picture starring Ewan McGregor (The Guardian).

Dr. Alfred Jones lives a quiet, predictable life. He works as a civil servant for the National Centre for Fisheries Excellence in London; his wife, Mary, is a determined, no-nonsense financier; he has simple routines and unassuming ambitions. Then he meets Muhammad bin Zaidi bani Tihama, a Yemeni sheikh with money to spend and a fantasticâ??and ludicrousâ??dream of bringing the sport of salmon fishing to his home country.

Suddenly, Dr. Jones is swept up in an outrageous plot to attempt the impossible, persuaded by both the sheikh himself and power-hungry members of the British government who want nothing more than to spend the sheikh's considerable wealth. But somewhere amid the bureaucratic spin and Yemeni tall tales, Dr. Jones finds himself thinking bigger, bolder, and more impossibly than he ever has before.

Told through letters, emails, interview transcripts, newspaper articles, and personal journal entries, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen is "a triumph" that both takes aim at institutional absurdity and gives loving support to the ideas of hopes, dreams, and accomplishing the impossible (The Guardian… (meer)

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Vissen op zalm in Jemen door Paul Torday (2007)

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Engels (73)  Duits (3)  Spaans (3)  Portugees (Portugal) (1)  Frans (1)  Alle talen (81)
1-5 van 81 worden getoond (volgende | toon alle)
A good quick easy read. Politics and its machinations on an engineering project. ( )
  SteveMcI | Jan 6, 2024 |
Kurze Inhaltsangabe
Alfred Jones, ein schüchterner Wissenschaftler und Experte in Sachen Lachs- und Forellenzucht, steht vor einer unlösbaren Aufgabe: Für einen steinreichen Scheich soll er in dessen Heimat, ausgerechnet im Wüstenstaat Jemen, eine Lachsfarm anlegen. Sofort mischt sich Englands profilneurotischer Premierminister ein, der in Jones' Vorhaben eine Möglichkeit sieht, die Medien von den unerfreulichen Nachrichten aus dem Nahen Osten abzulenken.
  ela82 | Nov 14, 2023 |
This is a strange and wonderful book with heart and deep wicked humor. Told with a series of memos, diary extracts, parliament records and other "documents" a story of vision and political turbidity, which bizarrely includes an interview, fictitious, by Boris Johnson in which he comes off as educated and alert. I don't think any other real person enters the story. ( )
  quondame | May 10, 2023 |
La historia de la Humanidad está jalonada de descubrimientos que en un principio parecían imposibles, hasta que alguien demostró que no lo eran. Esta original ópera prima, de humor elegante e incisivo, es una mirada irónica sobre la fragilidad de nuestras convicciones, el poder estimulante de la fe y el absurdo de un sistema político basado en el impacto de la imagen.
La anodina carrera del doctor Alfred Jones transcurre sin sobresaltos en el Centro Nacional para el Fomento de la Piscicultura, donde ha cimentado su reputación en un trabajo pionero sobre la reproducción de los moluscos. Sin embargo, todo cambia el día que su jefe le pide evaluar un extraño proyecto: introducir el salmón en Yemen. Racional de los pies a la cabeza, Fred no duda un instante en desestimarlo tajantemente, ignorando que detrás de la peculiar idea está Mohamed ben Zaidi bani Tihama, un acaudalado jeque empeñado en exportar el purificador arte de la pesca con mosca a las montañas del norte de Yemen. La situación se complica cuando el disparatado proyecto capta la atención de un ambicioso asesor del primer ministro, que descubre una excelente oportunidad para mejorar la imagen del Reino Unido en Oriente Medio y de paso proyectar su futuro político. De pronto, los implacables engranajes del poder se ponen en marcha y el doctor Jones se ve obligado a reconsiderar su dictamen inicial, colaborar con la joven y atractiva representante del jeque y lanzarse a una aventura con un final digno de la mejor novela de intriga.
  Natt90 | Feb 9, 2023 |
This was Paul Torday's first novel and in my view still his best -- and surely one of the best book titles of all time. Surprisingly engrossing, the premise is so unlikely that you find yourself carried along by the desire to know what happens. It takes the form of a series of supposed diary entries and memos about a mad-cap project by an Arab sheikh to turn a dry desert creek into a salmon-fishing river, recruiting an English fish expert to achieve the impossible, money no object. In the course of it the expert falls in love with the management consultant that the sheikh has hired to run the project. Well worth the read, ( )
  novels4nat | Jan 17, 2023 |
1-5 van 81 worden getoond (volgende | toon alle)
The impossible title of this extraordinary book took me back to a moment nearly 20 years ago. I had walked for three days down Wadi Surdud, one of the great seasonal watercourses that cut their way towards the Red Sea through the western highlands of Yemen. The scenery was extravagant - deep chasms sculpted by floodwater, pinnacles where lightning licked at high-perched castles, the seats of South Arabian lairds. At last, the gradient decreased, and as I rounded a bend I saw in one of the occasional pools that lay in the wadi bed something I have never seen in Yemen before or since: a man fishing with rod and line. Not, of course, for salmon: this was the coarsest of coarse fishing, for minnow-sized awshaj - I think a type of barbel - with a stick for a rod and a grain of maize for bait. The incongruous scene remains in my memory, and always will. Yemen is a memorable country: "Not a day will pass in your life," wrote the Master of Belhaven, a laird from the distant north, "but you will remember some facet of that opal-land."

Here, as well as lairds and castles, we have mists and glens, kilts, dirks and the odd feud or two. But unlike in Scotland the rain is considerate, coming at known seasons and times of day. It is also somewhat sparing, and there are no natural lochs or permanent rivers, and certainly no salmon (except smoked, on HBM ambassador's canapés). So Paul Torday's debut novel is about an impossibility. It is also about belief in the impossible, and belief itself. And the remarkable thing is that a book about so deeply serious a matter can make you laugh, all the way to a last twist that's as sudden and shocking as a barbed hook.

As with all good comedy, there's a tragic underside, a story of love and loss and another of love that never was. And there is satire. Torday's aim is deadly; but then, his targets are big. Jay Vent, the British prime minister, has taken his country into wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and elsewhere in the region: the story is set in the nearish future . . .) and has dug himself into the deepest of holes. So what does he do? Of course: he goes on digging. "We're pretty much committed to going down a particular road in the Middle East," says Vent, a graduate, like his real-life counterpart, of the White Queen's school of logic, "and it would be difficult to change that very much without people beginning to ask why we'd started down it in the first place." . . .

toegevoegd door PLReader | bewerkThe Guardian, Tim Mackintosh-Smith (Feb 24, 2007)
 
This is an odd artefact. It depicts an attempt to introduce salmon to rivers in the Yemeni Highlands via the largesse of a local sheikh and the expertise of a UK government agency.

The book - it can scarcely be described as a novel - is constructed from supposed diary entries, letters, emails, extracts from Hansard, fragments of autobiography, a TV game show script, transcripts of television and press interviews, Select Committee Report conclusions and interrogations of the various participants in this madcap scheme. All have differing viewpoints and narrators. As such the whole becomes diffuse and bitty.

While there is an overall narrative thread the disparate voices too often fail to suspend disbelief. Instead of being presented with a convincing rendering of a diary extract or interview transcript we are given novelistic embellishments. The diary extracts contain information that we as readers ought to have but a diarist would not find it necessary to include. In one of the interviews a respondent states a person spoke mildly when surely they would report only the relevant conversation’s content, in another there is an (uncredited) interruption which reads, “The witness became emotional after the consumption of custard creams and was incoherent. The interview was resumed after a break of four hours.” This authorial interpolation is, I suppose, intended humorously but is, instead, bathetic, if not pathetic. The Hansard extracts do not quite reflect accurately the format of Prime Minister’s Questions. While it might be said that this is a comic novel and some licence is allowable, to get details such as this last example wrong detracts from the intended effect. Infelicities such as those above totally fail to create the necessary degree of verisimilitude. The name dropping of real people as interviewers - Andrew Marr, Boris Johnson - while the politicians and aides are fictional (yet recognisable) is also a mistake.

The book is obviously meant to be a satire but its approach is so scattershot that it is difficult to tell exactly what or whom is the intended target. Is it the workings of bureaucracies, office politics, communications directors/spin doctors, career women, politicians, even Islamic terrorists? All are featured, but the focus never stays in one place for long. The only character who has any semblance of solidity is the supposedly mad sheikh; and he has no viewpoint narrative.

After the novel’s end we also have “Reading Group Notes” containing items “for discussion.” Some may find this condescending.

Salmon Fishing In The Yemen has its moments; but they are few.
toegevoegd door jackdeighton | bewerkA Son Of The Rock, Jack Deighton
 

» Andere auteurs toevoegen (12 mogelijk)

AuteursnaamRolType auteurWerk?Status
Paul Tordayprimaire auteuralle editiesberekend
Sessions, JohnVertellerSecundaire auteursommige editiesbevestigd

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This book is dedicated to my wife Penelope, who can catch salmon in bright sunlight and at low water, to the friends I fish with on the Tyne and the Tay, and to the men and women of the Environment Agency, without whom there would be far fewer fish in our rivers.
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Dear Dr Jones, We have been referred to you by Peter Sullivan at the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (Directorate for Middle East and North Africa).
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Wikipedia in het Engels (1)

Fiction. Literature. Humor (Fiction.) HTML:

An unassuming scientist takes an unbelievable adventure in the Middle East in this "extraordinary" novelâ??the inspiration for the major motion picture starring Ewan McGregor (The Guardian).

Dr. Alfred Jones lives a quiet, predictable life. He works as a civil servant for the National Centre for Fisheries Excellence in London; his wife, Mary, is a determined, no-nonsense financier; he has simple routines and unassuming ambitions. Then he meets Muhammad bin Zaidi bani Tihama, a Yemeni sheikh with money to spend and a fantasticâ??and ludicrousâ??dream of bringing the sport of salmon fishing to his home country.

Suddenly, Dr. Jones is swept up in an outrageous plot to attempt the impossible, persuaded by both the sheikh himself and power-hungry members of the British government who want nothing more than to spend the sheikh's considerable wealth. But somewhere amid the bureaucratic spin and Yemeni tall tales, Dr. Jones finds himself thinking bigger, bolder, and more impossibly than he ever has before.

Told through letters, emails, interview transcripts, newspaper articles, and personal journal entries, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen is "a triumph" that both takes aim at institutional absurdity and gives loving support to the ideas of hopes, dreams, and accomplishing the impossible (The Guardian

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