Swallowing A Donkey's Eye tells a farcical, satirical, funny, angry, heartfelt, and tragic story. It takes place in an imaginary City, in the now/otherwhen. Roughly the first third is farcical, the second, satirical, and the third is heartfelt. All of it is funny, angry, and tragic. I liked it a lot.I had a teensy-weensy bit of trouble with a big reveal/plot turn near the end. It didn't quite fit, somehow. Balancing that, the heartfelt part near the end involving the handwritten letter, followed...

Read 10/13/16 - 10/16/164 Stars - Strongly Recommended: it'll blow you off your ass like a donkey bomb, yo!Pages: 276Publisher: ChiZine PublicationsReleased: 2012This book knocked my fucking socks off. I found the subversive and satirical nature of the novel intriguing as all hell and chewed through the thing like ET on a trail of Reese's pieces.In it, we find ourselves in the hands of an unnamed narrator who's signed himself over to Farm for six years in an effort to help relieve his mom of som...

Another charming, funny, sad, strange tale from a very talented writer.

Tremblay's dystopian, near-future sf novel is funny, angry, and bittersweet all at once. The setting, City, is a place of rampant bureaucracy and injustice, but Tremblay, like his windblown narrator, digs deep enough to find both the absurdity and the heart buried inside it. Tremblay has always been a writer with a deep sense of humanity that comes through in his work, and the deeper you get into SWALLOWING A DONKEY'S EYE, the more humanity you'll find amid its sometimes slapdash shenanigans, ov...

With post-modern echoes of "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close," (also a young man's journey to find word of a missing/departed parent) this novel leads the reader deep into the underbelly of a perfected Capitalist dystopia. The slapstick, stylized, and colorful (in the way that an abandoned, haunted amusement park is colorful) tone is a change of pace for Tremblay—while maintaining the author's tongue-in-cheek (or in this case, tongue-in-beak) irreverence that makes the pointedly harsh lessons...

Paul Tremblay's SWALLOWING A DONKEY'S EYE is an odd story. It's funny, artisric, real and dark. The protagonist id on a journey. Sometimes your sitting right next to him and other times your in another car along side observing.The generic settings of Farm and City serve both as chatacters if tbe story but also insignificant stories. The story itself feels detatched at times yet the plight of the protagonist pulks you through the plot undaunted.This is an interesting story that takes place in an

You could call Tremblay’s novel the Ani­mal Farm or Nine­teen Eighty-Four for a new gen­er­a­tion, but that would be easy, and not quite right. Like our other two entries, there’s a great deal of sur­face enjoy­ment here, just enjoy­ing the ride, but Trem­blay con­tin­u­ally digs to find hid­den deposits of emo­tion beneath the crazy, usu­ally in ref­er­ence to the name­less narrator’s child­hood. There’s a lot of Orwell scat­tered about, yes, but Aldous Hux­ley and Dou­glas Adams are def­i­nite...

What an odd and awesome book this is. What starts out as a kind of madcap dystopia turns much deeper and weirder as it goes on. Some of it is hilarious, some of it is profoundly disturbing, but it kept surprising me and defying my expectations, which is excellent, and under the duck suits and golden showers....well, let's say beyond the duck suits and golden showers, there's a novel with serious ambitions and some very challenging ideas about life and death and love and forgiveness.

Took me forever to read because I couldn't ever engage in the story. I hated all of the characters. The author's humor never resonated with me. The satire felt so over the top, I felt there was no message. In fact there's no growth or purpose to the story. Not something I enjoyed reading.

THIS REVIEW WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AT THE NERVOUS BREAKDOWN.Paul Tremblay’s Swallowing a Donkey’s Eye (ChiZine Publications) is a contemporary version of Animal Farm amped up on bitterness, future technology and sad realizations that things are not going to end well. Our unnamed narrator is forced into situations beyond his control, a reluctant hero in search of his mother, an angry youth who has little love left for his father, a boy not quite ready to be a man.As a teen, he runs off to work

A young man from a broken family tries to make the best of it in a dystopian city by working at "Farm," an artificial place that provides genetically altered food. When he learns his mother may be in trouble, he needs to escape, but leaving Farm isn't so easy. Soon he's on the run, entering politics, and learning that life is a miserable, complex thing, no matter what you do.This book has some rough edges, but its overall theme--the chaos of life--appeals to the side of me that fell in love with...

It's not that George Orwell needed a makeover, really. He's probably more pertinent today than he ever was. What Paul Tremblay did with SWALLOWING A DONKEY'S EYE is to twist ANIMAL FARM into a strange, trapezoidal object of wonder. Unlike Orwell's fable, this is an all-out dystopia that talks to people of our age. Maybe it won't age as well as the classic, but it speaks louder to our generation. Tremblay goes over the most troubling issues of our age from corporate work environment, to our relat...

I think this needs to be a quick review, as the longer it takes for you to read this, the further away you are from reading this novel. This was an absolute pleasure to read. I have never really thought of myself as a futuristic/dystopian fan, but this opened my eyes to a whole new world. One that perhaps I didn't really want to take a peek at. It was dark, perverse and yet pulled me in like a black hole. I will avoid a long summary, but just know that the main character is a tragic hero who tak...

This was a refreshing, absurd and very enjoyable novel. The main character and first-person narrator (who isn’t given a name) is a twenty-something who has left home in City to begin work on Farm. These locales are named for what they are, Farm, City and later in the story, Pier, a poverty- and disease-stricken place below City where the homeless and poor are exiled. When the main character learns that his mother (and this young man has some major mother and father issues, a trait which drives h...

Paul Tremblay's Swallowing a Donkey's Eye was a very fun read. It's a unique story that is somewhat absurdist. It feels like a mix between Kurt Vonnegut, Franz Kafka, and George Orwell, but it definitely has its own voice. I enjoyed every minute I spent reading this book.I highly recommend this book.

This was a terrific read and it just kept getting better. It’s funny, sad, smart, and continually surprising. A young man in a dystopic world of theme parks and arbitrary decisions breaks out of the Farm and finds that he’s in an orchestrated run for Mayor. He’s also on a quest to find his mother, who’s disappeared—apparently to the Pier, the underworld beneath City, where all the refuse and homeless are tossed. It’s a magnificent world, screwy and awful and touching. Tremblay’s vision is sardon...

Hear our complete review here: http://www.bookedpodcast.com/2012/08/...

A young man manages to escape Farm when his mother goes missing in City, scared that she has gone homeless and been sent to Pier.Upon arrival, he stumbles upon his father, who left the house when he was a teenager, who tells him, City wants him...as a mayor.In a very dark and dystopian world, we come to follow the journey of that kinda rude character, entangled between gouvernment pressures, political issues and his personal beliefs.I really liked how the characters were developping, in that ver...

I've had mixed experiences with Tremblay in the past (disliking the narcoleptic detective books, liking much of the short fiction), so it's nice to be able to recommend this book without reservation. Although the invention of comic dystopias seems a growth industry these days, this novel is completely fresh and often delightful. The first third, which deals with life on the Farm, is perhaps the liveliest and most memorable part of the book, but the rest, recounting the hapless protagonist's adve...

oh, what, is that me and paul tremblay?? it most certainly is!Trudi: haha! saw that title and my first thought was "oh noes, she has officially reached rock bottom with the monster porn!" You have corrupted me. I have been corrupted.i loved this post so much, i had to use it to start my review. i hope that is okay.i love that you people thought this was erotica. and i think paul will love it, too.it is not erotic, though, despite a golden-shower scene. it is hard to say what it is. this book is