The Blindman's Hat Bernard Cohen 1997

Dustjacket synopsis:

"Vernon is an expatriate Australian journalist working in Manhattan for a quality New York daily and Dida is a freelance mobile telephone technician. Muffy is a little white dog, and the world's cutest urban philosopher.

"When Vernon falls so deeply in love with Dida that he stops going to work to be with her, they could not have predicted his former employers would ask, plead, beg, threaten, kidnap and probably even murder to convince Vernon to return to the workplace.

"Vernon, Dida and Muffy determine to get to the bottom of this. They encounter dodgy Wall Street transactions, oppressive correspondence, muffled answering machine messages and undertake good twin/bad twin routines in their serach for truth. Through it all Vernon worries about his dwindling Australianness.

"The Blindman's Hat is Paul Auster with added exuberant silliness, Sara Paretsky stuffed full of red herrings, and Herge overcome with lust."

Quotes:
"Refreshingly paranoid" - Brian Castro

First Paragraph:

A couple of breeders are really going for it. He's a grunter and she's a panter. The whole thing's totally percussive for its entire observable duration. Two millilitres of perspiration percolate to the surface of their skins. All fluids are retained within the closed system - that is, between the sheets. Actually, it is not quite true that the system is self-contained. The top sheet is kicked off halfway through. Little is left to the imagination excepting the question 'Who are they?' It could be me and Dida but I can't tell because the woman on the bed isn't wearing a white hat and my dog Muffy is nowhere in sight.

From the Allen and Unwin paperback edition, 1997.

Notes:
This novel was the winner of the Australian/Vogel Award for 1996.

This page and its contents are copyright © 2001 by Perry Middlemiss, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.

Last modified: May 2, 2001.