The Coffee Story

by Peter Salmon

At the end of his sorry life, Teddy Everett, reluctant heir to the Everett fortune realises that he may have been at his best when he was 14, the night Kebreth made him a communist by rubbing coffee bean oil on his face. Then he was with Lucy, who gave him Chinese burns and taught him how to smoke. As he remembers his family, his wives (and their lovers) he tries to understand what happened to that boy. Fuelled by caffeine and full of vituperation, this is a riotously original debut of honour, cowardice and bravery.

Genres: Fiction

289 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 1, 2011

About the author

Peter Salmon is an Australian writer living in the UK. His biography of Jacques Derrida, An Event Perhaps, was published 2020.

He is a regular contributor to the New Humanist, and has been published in the Sydney Review of Books, the Guardian, the Tablet, Cordite and Versopolis.

His first novel, The Coffee Story (Sceptre, 2011), was a New Statesman Book of the Year.

He has written frequently for Australian TV and radio and for broadsheets including the Guardian and the Sydney Review of Books.

The Blue News, his satirical column about books and publishing, was subsequently collected and published by Melbourne University Press as Uncorrected Proof (2005).

He has received Writer’s Awards from the Arts Council of England and the Arts Council of Victoria, Australia.

Formerly Centre Director of the John Osborne/The Hurst Arvon Centre (2006-2012), he also teaches creative writing, most recently at Pembroke College, Cambridge and Liverpool John Moores University.

Reviews

[Hanka Jirovská]

I just couldn't take it anymore... I found the writing incoherent and I couldn't decipher any story or meaning in the first few chapters.

not every thrift store fiction book is a hidden gem, lesson learned.

[Glenith J. Jorgensen · Rating 1 out of 5]

Don't waste your precious reading moments on this one. Just my opinion.

[Vans Lim Singh · Rating 1 out of 5]

Couldn't really bring myself to finish it.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

To use one of Kim's expressions at Reading Matters, this novel is absolutely bonkers.  The Coffee Story is a wild, rambunctious, anti-narrative of opportunism and greed, chosen by Toby Litt as his book of the year in the New Statesman.  But it has fared badly at Goodreads, where though some have recognised the incoherence as the fragmented thoughts of a narrator in extremis, others have dismissed it as a waste of time, misanthropic, or unsatisfying and a bit messy.  That might be because the author, Australian Peter Salmon, is an admirer of the postmodern philosopher Derrida, and has just published a much-lauded bio, An Event, Perhaps: A Biography of Jacques Derrida (Verso, 2020).  I have never read Derrida, but I recognise a postmodern novel when I see it, and this one is very funny indeed.

Your life, they say, flashes before your eyes in your last moments, and Salmon has taken this ridiculous cliché (how could anyone know, eh?) and turned it into a novel.  Teddy Everett is dying of cancer, possibly in a prison hospital, and this is his deathbed confessional.  Or bragfest, take your pick.

The Goodreaders were right about one thing: Teddy is misanthropic, and misogynist too.  He is a horrible man, who comes from a genealogy of other horrible men.  He grows up in Ethiopia, heir to a rapacious coffee empire, and comes of age as communist insurgents begin to make their presence felt.  (There are references to Hailie Salassi, the Italian conquest of Ethiopia, the failure of the League of Nations to protect it and so on, but you can read the novel, as I did, in complete ignorance of Ethiopian history and politics and then look it up at Wikipedia afterwards if so minded.  Where, alas, you will find the usual dispiriting chronicle of African colonial and postcolonial events.)

Teddy, like his male ancestors, has bedded and wedded too many hapless women and feminists may justifiably groan in despair at the absence of women with any real agency.  But this misses the point: no one in this story has any real agency, least of all Teddy unable to do anything but endure the indignities and pain of terminal illness.  The reader is not disposed to feel sorry for him, but even so, when Teddy betrays his wives, his family and his country, he is no more than a bit player in a melodrama not of his making.  The characters in this novel are moving inexorably towards disaster, just as Ethiopia is.  

And yet the novel is very funny.  The playful narrator never lets the reader forget that this is a work of fiction, manipulating events with arbitrary authorial choices, such as when he declares that he's not given to suspense so let's alter the chronology and have the event happen then when it suits the narrative.  The mockery is laced with black humour:

My father watched the pickers below as he knocked back the tej. He had thought that his arrival in Africa—he always called it Africa not Ethiopia not Abyssinia, my mother did the same—would be like in the movies, the white massa carried in a sedan chair, hoisted on black shoulders, a further sedan chair swaying behind with his wife and son.  Obedience, obsequiousness, that sort of thing.  Hanging with the Duke of Gloucester at the Coronation, the presentation of zebras and the peeling of grapes.  Sitting on a porch being fanned by a native while the coffee-pickers turned plants into money and Ibrahim Salez turned that money into gold.  A spot of big-game hunting in the evening, safari suits and pith helmets, him and Holbrook posing with rifles for photographs, while awestruck Ethiopes held the heads of lions, gazelles buffalo oryx.  (p.162)

A white man's colonial fantasy, blithely indifferent to the reality around him. 

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/02/21/t...

[Jennifer Lawler · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s an achievement when an author holds your attention right until the end of a novel despite the main character being less than appealing!

Salmon manages to make the story of Teddy Everett, coffee company head honcho and man who has made many mistakes, worth sticking with. Let Teddy regale you with his life story as he reminisces from his disgraced death bed.

More fun than it sounds!

[Simon Blackburn · Rating 1 out of 5]

I gave up with 40 pages left, as the narrator was so utterly misanthropic that I could bear no more!

[Mckochan · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 I really hate discussions of body fluids and/or functions, but I enjoyed the historical and political ideas. And, I like a twist in plot.

[Jayne Charles · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book got off to a tremendous start - sharp, funny, some savagely brilliant characterisation. I loved it. As it went on, though, I loved it less. It became repetitive (for a good reason, as the narrator is dying of cancer and looking back on his life, his thought processes are random and keep getting interrupted), but I began to get the feeling there might not be much to the plot in the end, or he would have got to the point by now. And so it turned out. Reading this was like trying to bite into a really nice sandwich but discovering that it was, in turn, trying to bite you back. Result: unsatisfying and a bit messy.

[Jacqui Lademann · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting story about the bitterness of regret, and disappointment.

http://bookblog76.com/2011/10/02/the-...

[Linda · Rating 1 out of 5]

Read the first couple of pages and thought it looked interesting. It wasn’t! It’s rare that I leave a book unread but this couldn’t hold my interest. DNF