Copi - Böcker

Life isn’t easy for a Parisian rat. But Gouri is getting by: with his best friend Rakä, he’s got a small business selling worms to pigeons, a cozy bachelor nest at the local florist, an—as spring blooms in the City of Lights—a budding love interest. But after a double date goes horribly wrong, Gouri and Rakä, along with the royal Rat Court—the princesses Iris and Catarina, and their hilariously unpredictable mother, the Queen of Rats—find themselves adrift on the Seine, accessories after the fact to a double homicide, using their new ally, a small human child, as a life raft. From there, the hijinks metastasize. French police collar the gang along with Mimile, a sadistic murderer who never remembers his crimes. But having escaped lock-up (from the cell they'd been tossed into with their arch-enemies, a snake and a terrier), they pay a visit to the God of Man (a homeless recluse hiding out in the Sainte-Chapelle), but then the giant Rat Devil makes his appearance, full of fiery flatulence and threatening cataclysm…Told in a series of letters purportedly written in rat language and posted from Gouri to his former master, City of Rats is the second novel by French-Argentine exile, novelist, cartoonist, playwright, actor, and queer provocateur Copi to be translated into English and perhaps his most madcap work, an X-rated fable where his high-velocity prose smashes through societal taboos—moral, sexual, or otherwise—like a bullet train hitting a glass house. Whimsical, smutty, and surprisingly profound, City of Rats will leave no reader unscathed, and every reader awestruck.

Welcome to the gutters of 1970s Paris – and the transgressive, darkly comic world of City of Rats.When pet rat Gouri finds himself locked out of his owner’s apartment, he has no choice but to strike out alone onto the pavements of Paris. But what begins as a strange and marvellous bedtime story - Gouri and his new friend Raka selling flour-coated worms to pigeons for spare change - soon spirals into an exhilarating whirlwind of murder, sex, unionised hamsters, courtroom drama, and, finally, Armageddon.Told through a series of letters from Gouri to Argentinian playwright Copi, City of Rats channels Copi’s lifelong fascination with society’s outcasts - queer people, immigrants, the homeless - into a fiercely imaginative, unflinchingly provocative tale of a world hurtling into madness.'The greatest miniaturist of our age… Copi was a man of the Baroque, a Shakespeare, magically reincarnated in gay Paris' Cesar Aira'Decadent, poised, unpredictable, violent, galling, and marvellous' Charlie HebdoTRANSLATED BY KIT SCHLUTER; WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY CESAR AIRA