Summary & Study Guide A Hologram for the King by Dave Eggers

by BookRags

This study guide includes the following Plot Summary, Chapter Summaries & Analysis, Characters, Objects/Places, Themes, Style, Quotes, and Topics for Discussion.

25 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 20, 2013

Reviews

[Dafna Lazar · Rating 3 out of 5]

On first entering this book you experience an "Aha!" moment: Finally a masterpiece, an instant classic. As Eggers' style rolls on you begin to sense a deja vous, a home coming of sorts, back to all those existential classics that were left behind: a startling remarkable meeting of the theatre of the absurd with Alice in Wonderland;that languid absurdist black humor that is music at least to my ears. Yet marvelous style aside, after some 35 pages or so practical implausabilities begin to jar, and with all due respect to form and style, in our savvy age of information and skepticism one cannot overlook basic practical plausability. Examples: A)Alan Clay is fairly clueless regarding Hi tech: does it really make sense that the leading IT company in the world will hire him to lead a gigantic project with such super client as Saudi Arabia just because years ago he briefly met some nephew of the king? Not to mention that Alan Clay is unemployed, broke,and with a series of failed business ventures behind him? B)Alan is staying there for weeks on end in a fancy hotel, spending freely, being driven almost daily by a cab driver over huge distances, while reminding us often that he is broke; who is picking the tab for all this, while not much accounting to the company headquarters takes place during days on end of idling? And even after the deal falls through, he stays on without any clue if anybody will hire him-who is paying for his lingering stay in that fancy hotel etc? C)The romance with the doctor is unconvincing and doesn't make much sense; why would this supposedly beautiful female doctor fall for him who is described as a not particularly attractive over the hill man? It feels like that "hot stuf" was artificially tagged on as mandatory "spice" in publishing these days-for the bottom line of course, and to my mind the book deteriorates at that point.D)The doctor pulls, digs, scoops, scrapes, pulls harder and harder that supposedly innocuous growth on his neck. The surgery takes some hour with much blood and pain and yet he comes out of it instantly hardy and healthy as a new man. As far as I know an innocuous little growth takes a few minutes to remove; this kind of lengthy operation,with digging so deep does not fit the bill of an innocuous little sist. E)Since nothing was really wrong with Alan except in his own mind, how come he had mistaken a young boy for a wolf? There are many other smaller examples, for instance Zahra's habit of parting the curtain of her hair, supposedly as she did in their first encounter, and yet then it was just a strand dropping out of her hiijab, not a curtain. Still am glad the author stopped short of the obligatory explosion of happy ending customary in most novels these days.

[Mia Pelosi · Rating 1 out of 5]

A Hologram for the King by Dave Eggers is about a man named Alan Clay, a business man. He travels to Saudi Arabia to sell IT to King Abdullah, but the king has yet to arrive. This book was terrible. If I'm being honest, it was just so boring. Almost every chapter was the same thing. Alan woke up, realized he was late, got a ride from his new friend Yousef, arrived at the location, and sat in a tent with the three other businessmen because the King wasn't there. Every now and again Alan would take a walk on the beach or go to the main building, but that was about it. Then he would go home and get drunk by himself in his hotel room and attempt to write a letter to his daughter. Nothing exciting happened, and I found myself completely uninterested. I continued reading it because I had hope that something great would happen, but nothing did. But nothing exciting happened. I was bored almost all the way through. To add on, it kind of just abruptly ended. The King showed up in the last 5 pages of the book, and didn't like their idea, and then it just ended. Also, the way the author wrote the dialogue of the characters was confusing and I didn't like it. Dave Eggers didn't use quotation marks. He put a hyphen, the line of dialogue, but then it wasn't clear when the dialogue stopped because it just continued into other words that weren't apart of the dialogue. However, which that being said, there were a few parts that I did enjoy. I enjoyed Alan's journey of finding himself, in a way. He had gone through a nasty divorce, owed various people money, and couldn't afford to send his daughter to college. He was somewhat depressed, and when he was in Saudi Arabia, he met a few people that changed his life, and contributed to him finding himself again. His trip to Saudi Arabia got him to take a step back and realize what he was doing with his life, which was kind of cool to see. But other than that, this book was not exciting or thrilling in any way. I do not recommend it to anyone, it's a waste of time.