Overview

An existential dropout tries to restore his sanity by thinking, a tour guide attempts to repair a broken heart by shagging. Together, they ponder if a moment of perfect passion is worth a lifetime of remorse. Steve and Clive, best friends at Exeter University, take different career paths with contrasting fortunes. Disillusioned with life, they reunite three years later in Texas, before embarking on a journey to reminisce, resolve, and plan their futures. They undertake a physical and emotional road trip through desolate Mexican landscapes, travelling in a temperamental Dodge as unreliable as its passengers. The journey is laced with reminisces of their time at university – self-discovery, the music of the 70s, experimentation with drugs, and barren disco nights. Clive exploits every opportunity to have sex, while Steve advises that successful relationships are built on the twin pillars of authenticity and responsibility. Steve, influenced by Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, attempts to explain how to live as a true existentialist, authentically, accepting responsibility for choices, confronting anguish, and resisting suicide, while Clive mopes. Steve deduces that a true existentialist could never write such a voluminous work when he was struggling to finish reading it.

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9781806343409

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Neil Skilton was born in the UK. He existed as an only child in a military family; his childhood consisted of moving every two years, new country, new school, new friends, and he was incarcerated as a teenager. His classmates in the reformatory were hell – Camus, Sartre, Kafka – and introduced him to existentialism and despair. He existed, but found it nauseating. To others, he was aloof, strange, unsociable and thought too much. Then he wrote a novel.

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