What do you think?
Rate this book
Tomas
There has been much talk of late about how the continuing financial turmoil will find expression in the arts. Will the literature of this depression match the quality of that created in the 1930s?
Impossible to précis its narrative, Palumbo's story weaves and curves its way around the adventures of Tomas, a young man ensconced in a world of wealth, privilege and corruption.
Like Candide and Gulliver before him, Tomas's adventures will startle the reader's imagination, yet linger in her mind. What seems grotesque, even impossible, has already happened … For excess of imagination, passion, outrage, death and love, greed and vice, often provide a clearer view of life.
Impossible to précis its narrative, Palumbo's story weaves and curves its way around the adventures of Tomas, a young man ensconced in a world of wealth, privilege and corruption.
Like Candide and Gulliver before him, Tomas's adventures will startle the reader's imagination, yet linger in her mind. What seems grotesque, even impossible, has already happened … For excess of imagination, passion, outrage, death and love, greed and vice, often provide a clearer view of life.
- GenresFiction
180 pages, Paperback
First published July 1, 2009
2 people are currently reading
76 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
February 21, 2020
A work of great marketing and not much else.
August 30, 2013
Strangely, I feel vaguely guilty for not liking this novel more. I had high hopes of social satire on modern celebrity culture & the immorally hedonistic lifestyle of the super-rich & mega-famous. Instead, Tomas is merely a gross charicature which is as equally lacking in substance as its subject matter. A darn cynical charicature, too - apparently the only cure for the celebrity disease is to kill them all off. And replace them with what, exactly?
In the pretext 'warning' (HOW pretentious?), Palumbo attests that "below these black printed words, spread page over page, lies a vision of the world that will alarm the majority, revolt the sensitive & obliterate the prudish." But that isn't the issue at all. I can admit with shame & pride in equal measure that excessive sex & violence are water off a ducks' back for this Takashi Miike fan. Instead I was depressed by its lack of substance. Hats off, it's well-written with some nice imagery & very pretty pictures but beneath the sound & fury, its contents are more echoingly hollow than a Malteser easter egg.
Palumbo spends 200-odd pages repeatedly telling us that the emperor has no clothes. But everyone knows that these days. You're part of the problem, grandad - author of a memeplex you hope our culture will be shocked by, who has forgotten that nothing shocks the Jerry Springer generation. Thus it will just be chewed up & used to get supposedly disenfranchised buns on seats. Just another case of The Big C (culture, that is) using self-referencialism to hegemonise & survive. Palumbo's just the kid who takes the mick out of the rest of the class because he secretly wants to be accepted by them & doesn't know how else to be noticed.
The next time Jordan waddles into the room, I'm just gonna ignore her. That will achieve more than mowing her down with a tommygun, or merely writing about that happening.
In the pretext 'warning' (HOW pretentious?), Palumbo attests that "below these black printed words, spread page over page, lies a vision of the world that will alarm the majority, revolt the sensitive & obliterate the prudish." But that isn't the issue at all. I can admit with shame & pride in equal measure that excessive sex & violence are water off a ducks' back for this Takashi Miike fan. Instead I was depressed by its lack of substance. Hats off, it's well-written with some nice imagery & very pretty pictures but beneath the sound & fury, its contents are more echoingly hollow than a Malteser easter egg.
Palumbo spends 200-odd pages repeatedly telling us that the emperor has no clothes. But everyone knows that these days. You're part of the problem, grandad - author of a memeplex you hope our culture will be shocked by, who has forgotten that nothing shocks the Jerry Springer generation. Thus it will just be chewed up & used to get supposedly disenfranchised buns on seats. Just another case of The Big C (culture, that is) using self-referencialism to hegemonise & survive. Palumbo's just the kid who takes the mick out of the rest of the class because he secretly wants to be accepted by them & doesn't know how else to be noticed.
The next time Jordan waddles into the room, I'm just gonna ignore her. That will achieve more than mowing her down with a tommygun, or merely writing about that happening.
May 24, 2022
I found this book shocking and unsettling, but not for the reasons the author so desperately and transparently intends.
The content, which we're pompously warned about in the foreword, is a hackneyed and weirdly unthreatening conveyor belt of two-dimensional awfulness: gang rape, castration, coprophilia and whatever else are wheeled out in limp, half-hearted fashion. There is no narrative coherence or experimental exploration, and even less satirical impact, just a boring succession of grotesque and / or mutilated bodies.
What's truly shocking about Tomas is that writing this poor, and a concept this tired, was considered fit to publish in the first place. But then Palumbo's a fabulously wealthy man with a seat in the Lords: a fully-fledged and unapologetic member of the decadent elites he makes such a derivative and incoherent attempt to satirise. For men like him, the doors of publishers will always remain open.
If you want to understand the rot at the heart of society, then reading Tomas is entirely superfluous: the mere fact it exists is a thousand times more powerful a piece of satire than anything Palumbo can come up with.
The content, which we're pompously warned about in the foreword, is a hackneyed and weirdly unthreatening conveyor belt of two-dimensional awfulness: gang rape, castration, coprophilia and whatever else are wheeled out in limp, half-hearted fashion. There is no narrative coherence or experimental exploration, and even less satirical impact, just a boring succession of grotesque and / or mutilated bodies.
What's truly shocking about Tomas is that writing this poor, and a concept this tired, was considered fit to publish in the first place. But then Palumbo's a fabulously wealthy man with a seat in the Lords: a fully-fledged and unapologetic member of the decadent elites he makes such a derivative and incoherent attempt to satirise. For men like him, the doors of publishers will always remain open.
If you want to understand the rot at the heart of society, then reading Tomas is entirely superfluous: the mere fact it exists is a thousand times more powerful a piece of satire than anything Palumbo can come up with.
Read
March 29, 2022Reviews call this a surreal satire.
There is certainly some satire but I feel it gets lost in the random bizarreness and intent to shock throughout the book.
From about a third of the way through I think I was just trying to make it to the end. I've far preferred other novels providing social satire.
There is certainly some satire but I feel it gets lost in the random bizarreness and intent to shock throughout the book.
From about a third of the way through I think I was just trying to make it to the end. I've far preferred other novels providing social satire.
January 8, 2019
Bizarre but genius.
June 10, 2024
this is a book about being smarter-than and better-than and its author is clearly aware of it lamely failing in both regards.
October 8, 2025
Expected more, but maybe it was more shocking and new at the date of publication than it is now. The twists were too frequent and halted character development in favour of quick shocks.
July 4, 2014
I'm sure there was a point at which I was enjoying this book, perhaps the scene where Tereza tortures the banker with the hungry pigs (an idea that anyone would appreciate, surely). However, the ham-fisted attempts at satire and the non-plot began to grate on me to a point where I couldn't even finish the damn thing; I can't begin to imagine why Stephen Fry thinks that this is a work of genius. It fails to have either depth or basic characterization.
August 7, 2011
The kind of thing that Hunter S Thompson might have written had he not been getting good acid, or if he'd lost a day or so hanging out with William Buroughs. Entertaining but nothing new. My fault for believing the advertising hype, I guess!
March 10, 2012
Critical views on the modern dystopia. Nice to see that others think the same way as me regarding the idolatry of celebrity, the overpaid pointlessness of professional football and the inane banality of TV. Very good. Pass the automatic weapons someone........
September 2, 2011
Great Book! looking forward to Tancredi, the next one from James P.
Read
June 14, 2012Shocking, titillating, I honestly couldn't put it down. An absolutely brilliant satyrical commentary on pop culture and our obsession with, well, sh*t TV.
June 26, 2012
I didn't finish reading this book because I thought it was awful! If I could give it 0 stars or 1/2 a star I would.
October 25, 2009
If this book doesn't sum up Western society right now then I don't know what does.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews