num_pages: 489
description: IS BE OR IS BE NOT, IS BE ONE BIG DAMN PUZZLEROn a remote South Pacific island paradise the struggles of an elderly tribesman to translate Shakespeare's Hamlet into the local pidgin English are interrupted by the unexpected arrival of a young American lawyer with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. From that moment on, nothing will ever be the same . . .What follows is an ambitious and wonderfully original novel, inviting us into a sublimely imagined world teeming with life, ideas and full of wonders - the islanders with their strange notions about sex, their madly logical rituals and their tortured but addictive version of the English language, a curiously large number of people with artificial legs, and the dwarf pigs they hunt (when they can be bothered). It's a place where magic is everywhere, where you can buy a potion to make someone fall in love with you (all it costs is a few yams) and visit the kassa house and discover that the dead may not be so dead after all. It's a world so different it questions our own values and ideas about love, life and even death.Life-affirming, achingly funny and profoundly moving, One Big Damn Puzzler confirms John Harding as one of contemporary fiction's most entertaining and observant chroniclers of the human condition.
language: English
title: One Big Damn Puzzler
titlecomplete: One Big Damn Puzzler
genres: Fiction, Magical Realism, Book Club, Comedy, Humor, Adult, Novels, Contemporary, Adult Fiction, Literary Fiction
ratings_count: 1332
publisher: Doubleday