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    A Hologram for the King
    A Hologram for the King
    A Hologram for the King
    Audiobook7 hours

    A Hologram for the King

    Written by Dave Eggers

    Narrated by Dion Graham

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    In a rising Saudi Arabian city, far from weary, recession-scarred America, a struggling businessman pursues a last-ditch attempt to stave off foreclosure, pay his daughter's college tuition, and finally do something great. In A HOLOGRAM FOR THE KING, Dave Eggers takes us around the world to show how one man fights to hold himself and his splintering family together in the face of the global economy's gale-force winds. This taut, richly layered, and elegiac novel is a powerful evocation of our contemporary moment- and a moving story of how we got here.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateJun 19, 2012
    ISBN9781470322595
    A Hologram for the King
    Author

    Dave Eggers

    Dave Eggers is the founder of McSweeney’s, a quarterly journal and website (www.mcsweeneys.net), and his books include You Shall Know Our Velocity, How We Are Hungry, Short Short Stories, What is the What, and the bestselling A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. His work has appeared in the New Yorker and Ocean Navigator. He is the recipient of the Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was a 2001 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He lives in Northern California.

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    Reviews for A Hologram for the King

    3.5/5

    505 ratings42 reviews

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    • 1/5
      I did not like The profanity,Having sex with an animal is not a joke. There should be a warning . The profanity take away the essence of the story

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      I liked the writing, not too much the plot. Anyway I read it in less than 24h
    • 4/5
      Loved this! "Waiting for Godot"--or maybe Kafka's "The Castle"--for those living through the Second Great Depression and the Decline and Fall of the American Empire. And Eggers would probably hate that description. He pulls it all off with an unassuming, small story about a divorced American consultant and worried father on a business trip to Saudi Arabia, where he waits for the King to see his company's presentation. Whenever the story felt like it might fall into cliche, Eggers opted for the real. Beautifully direct, psychologically acute, culturally true.
    • 4/5
      I really enjoyed this book by Eggers. The story follows an American man, past his prime, who leads a team of younger individuals, trying to get an IT account in a new Saudi city. While the team waits for the king, whose schedule is erratic and last minute, to attend their presentation, we are privy to the internal monologue of the protagonist ( I forget his name). The disappointments and crises he has not left behind in Boston appear in relief against the unfamiliarity of the landscape and uncertain interpersonal relationships. I found the plot line and story construction well done, and I felt transported to Saudi Arabia.
    • 4/5
      It was a good book. I enjoyed reading it. Interesting story. I also watched the movie which was more optimistic than the book. I think the book version was more realistic that the one i saw in movie.
    • 5/5
      Really liked this book. It felt light and airy even though the topics were sad and lonely. I guess it seemed like a short story that was inflated into a novel. That doesn't sound good, but actually I loved it.
    • 4/5
      Meet Alan Clay, an American salesman in his mid-fifties. He is in debt, his credit is bad, and his career is in decline. His daughter and ex-wife are not getting along. He is becoming increasingly aware of his shortcomings, though he remains optimistic. Alan’s company has sent him and a team of three young consultants to Jeddah to try to win the information technology infrastructure contract for King Abdullah Economic City, a sprawling new development in the middle of the Saudi Arabian desert. They are all set to meet with the king to demonstrate the company’s holographic conferencing capability. The only problem is that the king is repeatedly unavailable, and the team is setup in a tent with limited wi-fi and no food. Alan believes if he can just sell this contract, he can get his life back on track.

      Eggers has written a book filled with subtle humor and irony. Alan’s actions have contributed to his predicament, but he fails to acknowledge it. He is trying to sell virtual technology in a city that may never be fully developed to a king who repeatedly fails to appear. So, Alan drifts aimlessly. He tours the construction zone, encounters a few women, and, in one of the highlights of the book, forms a friendship with a local driver.

      This book is, in part, a social commentary on globalization and the associated economic impacts. It is also a deep character study of a man who used to manufacture and sell physical products (bicycles), but now struggles to remain relevant in an increasingly virtual, downsized, and outsourced world. Alan is presented as somewhat of a holographic image himself, a person whose role has faded and who keeps making poor decisions. He tries to point to an external reason for his troubles, a growth on his neck, but the real problem lies deeper within. He is still trying to apply old rules to a new game.

      The plot is sparse, the prose is spare, and the pace matches the on-again-off-again schedule for meeting with the king. Eggers explores several aspects Saudi Arabian culture through the eyes of an American, which may hold a few surprises for readers. I can’t speak to the accuracy, but Eggers appears to have done his homework in fact-checking with those in the know. I found it clever and entertaining.
    • 2/5
      I'm really not sure if I liked this or not. It was well written (an easy read, in fact) but it felt more like the idea of a novel than an actual novel. Eggers seems to want to tell some grand story of American decline, only the plot, characters, and setting are hazy and ill defined. The theme is heavy handed and at points I felt I was being treated to a lecture from someone who had no particular claim to being able to lecture on the subject. Eggers may have mostly pulled it off in Zeitoun--he doesn't manage it here.
    • 3/5
      Everything is a bit unreal and I liked that. The historical commentary and analogies to America's decline are of less interest to me as I'm not American but I can see how they could make the character more sympathetic for Americans.
    • 2/5
      I truly wanted to enjoy A Hologram For the King; I had high expectations. The book is beautiful to behold, and the title itself is a bit titilating - Yay! There's going to be a Hologram! And a King! Plus, it's Dave Eggers, for chrissake. And I love Dave Eggers, don't I?

      But this story of a bland white male who, while in Saudi Arabia trying to lift himself and his family from the jaws of bankruptcy, who does little but drink in his hotel room, letting down his hotshot IT team, letting down his daughter, letting down the other women who might love him. He's letting me down too.

      And where's the Saudi Arabia in this novel? LET ME OUT OF YOUR HOTEL ROOM ALAN CLAY! And these other characters - the young hotshots that Alan is purportedly leading in this venture - are mere sketches of their possible selves. The only interesting character is Yousef, Clay's cab driver, who spent a year of college in Alabama and who checks his car's wiring for explosives each day, in fear that someone is trying to kill him.

      I think I love the idea of Dave Eggers. I certainly love his work with McSweeney's, 826 Valencia, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading series. I loved What is the What, but largely for its historical and social content. So perhaps I love Dave Eggers as an activist; perhaps I love him as a leader of social reform; and perhaps I need to stop expecting so much from his novels.
    • 5/5
      I’m not sure what’s happened to Dave Eggers lately but I’m not complaining. The last two novels I’ve read by him have been astonishingly readable compared to his old stuff. There is a lot of light and space in this where previously there would have been a lot of wordy paragraphs. This was a fascinating look at Saudi Arabia - the idiosyncrasies of business practice there, the oppressive heat, the people who live there, the attitudes to alcohol, everything right down to the muslim and non-muslim lanes on the highway to Mecca. Either rigorously researched or magnificently made up. The chances of me ever going there to check which it is are vanishingly small. The trials and tribulations of the central character Alan drive the narrative along, but it is the depiction of his surroundings that will stay with me.
    • 5/5
      America’s recent Great Recession, from which the economy’s “recovery” is still largely a matter of debate as seen through the eye of the individual beholder, hit the ranks of middle management particularly hard. Suddenly men and women of a certain age (generally those over 50) found themselves jobless and with little prospect of ever replacing their lost jobs with anything that paid anywhere near the wages they were accustomed to earning. Homes were lost, marriages ended, and dreams were forever shattered. Alan Clay, the main character of Dave Eggers’s A Hologram for the King, is one of those people.The story begins this way: “Alan Clay woke up in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. It was May 30, 2010. He had spent two days on planes to get there.”Alan is in Jeddah to sell King Abdullah a holographic teleconference system that could prove to be instrumental in winning for his company the entire IT contract for the King’s new economic city (which at the moment exists primarily on the drawing board and in the minds of the king and his advisers). But the 54-year-old Clay, formerly a key management player in the Schwinn bicycle company when bicycles were still manufactured in the U.S., really knows and understands very little about the software he is there to peddle to the king. He is in the kingdom to introduce the presentation largely because of his previous connections to a distant cousin of the king’s. The king, however, is not a man to be rushed, and for now Alan and his team of four software experts spend their days in a large tent waiting on the man to show up for the software demonstration they hope will win them his business. And they play solitaire, and they sleep, and they wonder if the meeting will ever happen.Alan, though, is not content to play the waiting game. He has befriended his personal driver, a young man partially educated in Alabama, and the two of them explore aspects of Saudi Arabian society that most Westerners are never allowed to glimpse, much less immerse themselves in to the degree that Alan manages to do it. But Alan wonders what happened to him – how did he end up in Saudi Arabia with his future hopes so closely linked to a product he knows so little about? What happens to him if the king is unimpressed? What happens if the king never shows up? How did it come to this?Entertaining as it is, A Hologram for the King manages to take a long hard look at the Great Recession through the eyes of one of its typical victims, a man who is unlikely ever to recover all that the recession snatched from him. Perhaps the best that men like Alan can hope for is to recover their personal dignity and self-worth – but that is not an easy thing for an American to do in a place like Saudi Arabia.
    • 3/5
      I'm very grateful for this novel: the problems of middle-age white men with personal crises simply cannot be discussed enough. Bravo for charting new territory!
    • 3/5
      Listened. Gives you a good sense of the contradictions and weirdness of Saudia Arabia through American eyes. Would recommend.
    • 5/5
      Somewhere around 2006, a "Daily Mail" article reported that The King Abdullah Economic City, or KAEC (pronounced 'cake'), will be slightly larger than Washington DC and home to approximately two million residents.Covering 70 square miles, the metropolis is costing £67 billion ($100 billion) .The author of "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius", Dave Eggers, takes a cold-if one can say cold in a 110 degrees desert- look at late King of Saudi Arabia's planned dream one hour from the Red Sea port of Jeddah and close to the religious center of Makkah and Medina. His metafictional character is Alan, a new now old world of manufacturing salesman turned consultant with some Willy Loman qualities, who confronts this dream with its realities. Eggers gives the reader a look into a 7/24/60 world at the end of its rope in settings of a half-built city, a chlorine scented five stars hotel or a plastic white tent for IT geeks which under the magic of his pen acquire magical realism qualities. The style is sharp and to the point like in Chapter VI: "THE ENTIRETY of the new city thus far comprised three buildings".Eric Reguly of the "Globe and Mail in 2014 tells us that "Today, KAEC is about 10 per cent built but alive with activity. Mars Inc., the U.S. confectionery company, recently opened a Galaxy chocolate bar factory in KAEC. Sanofi, the French pharmaceuticals company, opened a drug-making and packaging factory the day Mr. Al-Rasheed and I got together. The port is open and a high-speed rail line that will connect KAEC to Jeddah and the holy cities of Mecca and Medina will be completed in 2016." Then the book is only a literary work of art and not an economic study in predictability.McSweeney's Books, the San Francisco publisher, did a fine work with this cover made of geometric patterns reflecting the harmony of everything on earth with gold lettering of the title bonded to the cover.
    • 1/5
      Boring, boring, boring. seriously...it's boring.
    • 2/5
      A really disappointing book. I probably would have given up on this book if I hadn't had faith that Dave Eggers would pull through in the end. There were a few bright moments, but I think the cover was the best part of the book.
    • 3/5
      An interesting story, both comic and sad, but as far as provocative social commentary goes, I prefer Eggers's The Circle.
    • 3/5
      This book starts out promisingly, but at the climax and beyond, the plot falls apart and looses all intrigue.
    • 3/5
      I was initially intrigued by the set up of this book, a sales pitch to be made to the King of Saudi Arabia by the aging representative of the firm offering IT to a new city to be built in the country, but eventually became bored by the waiting game: for me it was a bit like Waiting for Godot without the element of the absurd to redeem it.
    • 1/5
      "Death of a Salesman" lite set in Saudi Arabia. I would have thrown this book across the room, but it was so excruciatingly dull I couldn't muster the effort.
    • 2/5
      I was lured by the cover and the title. I was hoping for a quick, fun, brilliant story that would give me some insight into Saudi Arabia and international business Big mistake. I found a French movie from the '70s instead. Seriously: a French Movie from the '70s, one of those where nothing happens, and actors are trying to convey despair in thousand of different ways, but all they can express is boredom.

      But hey! If you have a sudden craving for a story about a weak, self-pitying, sad, aimless loser who just has to kill time for the ENTIRE book, and if you truly, truly would love the whole thing to be soaked in an aura of confusion, despair and depression, you're in for a fucking TREAT with "A hologram for the King"!!
    • 2/5
      I gave up on this book before I finished it, because I found it too depressing and too hopeless to follow to the end. This illustrates the fact that when it comes to fiction, tastes differ -- the reviews I read interested me in the book, and plenty of people have reviewed it favorably in this forum. Part of the problem was that the central character, Alan Clay (the ghost of Willy Loman hovers round), seemed doomed from the beginning. The fact that things were never going to come together was abundantly clear from the get-go, as was the fact Alan was going to screw up. None of the other characters did much to liven things up (presumably if Alan can't really see them, neither can we), and the setting was shall we say static. So, as things plodded inexorably downhill, I abandoned ship. (Confession and spoiler alert: I did check out the end. Yep.
    • 2/5
      For the life of me I have no idea what the point of this book was. I should have been warned when I saw on the cover that it was one of The New York Time Book Reviews 10 best books of the year, for me at least this is never a recommendation, for a book I will enjoy. I certainly did not enjoy this book of nothing. I really wish I had read some of the reviews on Goodreads first, I would never have bought the book. I had no idea the author was some 1960's author which explains a lot regarding the main characters disillusionment with the last 8 years. What is worse is that I never cared about Alan Clay the main character, and it seemed like neither did the Author.
    • 1/5
      What on earth has happened to Dave Eggers? It's a little hard to believe that the man who authored books like A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, How We Are Hungry and What is the What penned a work as weak as this.True, Zeitoun was written in a similarly simplistic style, which I forgave at the time as an attempt to replicate the title character's way with English as a second language. Unfortunately the same utterly basic prose is rolled out yet again here and it makes the novel an extremely blunt criticism of neo-liberal capitalism, globalization and the hollowing out of America's industrial base. These are heavy topics that have my sympathy and deserve attention, but Eggers' novel is so simplistic and obvious that the issues lack any subtlety and come across as rather tedious and boring when stretched over 300 plus pages.The less said about the novel's moping main character the better. Why Eggers thought a man who can't even write a letter to his daughter would make for an interesting lead character I have no idea. I quickly lost sympathy with Alan because he is so thoroughly useless and defeated. I have nothing against that sort of character - I love Turgenev's many superfluous men and their faults - but Alan is such a complete downer that I couldn't wait to end my time in his world.The ending is particularly lame too: overly simplistic and brief. I won't spoil what little there is to spoil, but it was just another unsatisfying element in a very poor novel.First Zeitoun and now this; I'm wondering if Eggers is worth my time any more. I'm certainly not rushing off to buy The Circle.
    • 4/5
      Not my usual read but I really enjoyed it.
    • 4/5
      Alan is a down and out middle-aged American sales rep, making a pitch for high tech IT hologram equipment to the King of Saudi Arabia. If he can make this sale, the commission will take care of his overwhlming debts. The problem is that he is in Saudi Arabia in a city that has yet to built and making a pitch to a client that no one is sure will turn up. Alan is at once recognizable and yet frustratingly immature and out of control, and he plays the fool yet again.
    • 4/5
      David Eggers, in A Hologram for the King, has written a novel of its time that peeks at the future while simultaneously showing us a dying epoch. Alan Clay, an aging salesman, is in Saudi Arabia hoping for one more big score to get his life back on track. Unable to bond with his young coworkers who are overly concerned with wifi and cell phone connections, Alan laments this new era, which he himself helped to usher in, where outsourcing tangibles have left the likes of him behind. Much of his time is spent waiting on the King’s arrival so a presentation can be pitched to win the bid on providing the technology infrastructure of a new city that will presumably be built. Meanwhile, we find a man crumbling, what with his failed relationships, impotency, binge drinking and mysterious lump that appears on his neck. However, we also find compassion for the ignominious Alan because he reminds of someone we once knew, if not ourselves.
    • 3/5
      UPDATE 10/10/12: NBA finalist?! Give me a break.
      --------

      -Hey, Dave Eggers has a new book out and it looks wonderful.

      -What's it about?

      -Who cares, it's a lovely book to hold.

      And that's probably the most exceptional thing about the novel. McSweeney's has continued to impress me with the effort and care that they put into the packaging and physicalness of their books. Maybe the publishing industry should take note of what they're doing and start copying it.

      Now for the story: A mid-fifties businessman struggling both in work and in life goes to Saudi Arabia for the chance to breath some life into his career and more importantly to improve his financial standing. But of course there's much more to it and the chance for his life to be turned around in a more meaningful way.

      Ultimately the story was unsatisfying because it wraps up in the blink of an eye. Ending it in that indie-film sort of way to keep you wondering what happens next may have been the goal. But it doesn't pull it off very effectively and just left me sort of annoyed.

      To be fair, the book was a lovely, easy read with the decent writing many expect from Eggers until page 309. It also offered an interesting glimpse into the kingdom of Saudi Arabia that I hadn't before seen.

      So for these reasons, and the handsomeness of the book, my rating is somewhere between 2.5 and 3 stars.
    • 1/5
      Really Poor book...goes on and on getting no where fast. Set in Saudi Arabia; King Abdullah, KAEC city never takes off, women's rights in Saudi Arabia touched on a little