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Summary
Summary
A dazzling debut novel wherein medieval Kabbalists, rare book librarians and Latter-Day Baconians skirmish for control over secret mystical knowledge, and - in this future ruled by competing giant fast food factions - one Neetsa Pizza employee discovers that no-one ever saved the world with pizza coupons. A brilliant sci-fi / literary crossover title with a healthy sense of the absurd, written in the same tongue-in-cheek spirit as Douglas Adams' Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy (1978).
Author Notes
RACHEL CANTOR was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and raised in Rome. She worked for jazz festivals in France and food festivals in Australia before getting degrees in international development and fiction writing. Her short stories have appeared in The Paris Review , One Story , Kenyon Review , Fence , and other publications. She has received fellowships from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Millay Colony, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and elsewhere, and has been a scholar at the Bread Loaf, Sewanee, and Wesleyan Writing Conferences. She lives in Brooklyn.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Leonard is an exemplary "Listener" in his job manning complaints hotline for the Pythagorean pizza chain, Neetsa Pizza. He is satisfied working from home, and has not ventured outside in over three years. His sister Carol says the world is broken, but Leonard's chooses to believe "bits of the world might be damaged, but never permanently so," and makes it "his mission, through Listening, to heal some part of it." Everything changes with a call from Marco, an imprisoned explorer returned from Cathay who refuses Leonard's pizza coupons and forces him to deviate from his safe, calculated responses. Cantor's wildly inventive debut novel is a mix of the comical and mystical, in a future ruled by fast-food conglomerates run by competing, antiquated sects. When Carol leaves Leonard with her son to attend missions with her book club, Leonard must finally leave the comforts of home to face the tumultuous world outside. Rife with deadpan humor and memorable characters mixed with time travel and supernatural powers, Cantor suspends disbelief and creates a loony world entirely of her own, which is terrifically funny and effortlessly enjoyable. This highly entertaining and adventurous tale will leave readers rooting for Leonard to save the world, with or without his coupons. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A man from the future explores the past through his heritage in this quirky metaphysical adventure. This is an intrepid debut from frequent short story contributor Cantor, but any reader without an encyclopedic knowledge of Jewish mysticism may wish to come armed with an open Wikipedia page. Meet Leonard--Leonard works in the complaints department of Neetsa Pizza, in a futuristic world where global commerce is dominated by fast-food chains. Leonard works in a clean room in his home answering the phones, chatting occasionally with his sister Carol, babysitting his nephew Felix and asking questions of the "Brazen Head," a contemporary version of the medieval automaton reputed to be able to answer any question. Because all of this isn't odd enough, Leonard suddenly can only get calls from "Milione," an explorer from the 13th century who nightly describes his travels to the Orient. Next, a stranger begins leveling some serious history onto Leonard, a man who oddly speaks with the voice of Leonard's dead grandfather but who identifies himself as the kabala scholar Rabbi Yitzhak Saggi Nehor, known colloquially as Isaac the Blind. It's fair to say that the average reader could easily be a quarter of the way into Leonard's adventure in space and time before realizing he or she is deeply mired in a witty but quite eccentric exploration of Jewish mysticism. For being a rather petite book, it lures in an array of historical figures ranging from Abraham Abulafia, the founder of Prophetic Kabbalah, to Marco Polo to the English philosopher Roger Bacon. It's an unusual way to examine Jewish history and medieval thinking, but the story doesn't carry enough weight to justify the experiment. Leonard makes for an amusing protagonist, and Cantor makes some salient points about passing on generational wisdom, but it doesn't completely work as satire, science fiction or farce. This play on history and heritage plunges headlong into the mystic, but it's written for a very niche market.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Global fast-food franchises rule the world, spawning contentious sects. Leonard, for instance, the hapless hero in first-time novelist Cantor's rambunctiously smart, pun-spiked, and sweet dystopian romantic comedy, works for Neetsa Pizza fielding customer complaints and is, therefore, a Pythagorean. His sister, Carol, serves Scottish tapas at Jack-'o-Bites, which means she should be a Jacobite. Instead, she's a neo-Maoist, always slipping off to book club, code for various revolutionary actions, leaving her gifted son, Felix, with doting Leonard. But once Leonard finds himself on the phone with Marco Polo, time, space, and the status quo begin to seriously warp. Soon Leonard, Felix, and Sally, a fetching Book Guide at the university library, are sent on an urgent, cosmic quest back to Marco's era, a mission involving two other thirteenth-century renegades, the English philosopher Roger Bacon and the prophetic Kabbalist Abraham Abulafia. Glimmering with signs and wonders and laced with satirical jabs at technological intrusiveness and deception, Cantor's funny and charming metaphysical adventure and love story is a wily inquiry into questions of perception, knowledge, mystery, legacy, and love.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IN A NOT-TOO-DISTANT FUTURE, in a world much like our own, a young man sits in a white room, answering a white phone, listening. In his world, fast-food chains and political philosophies are one. Jack-o-Bites chefs and Whiggery Piggery employees brawl with kebab sticks in the public square, and neo-Baconians keep safe houses to protect themselves from the Cathars at the Strawberry Parfait. At the center of it all, Leonard, a customer-service rep for a Pythagorean pizza company, must save the world by time traveling and speaking to historical figures through the Neetsa Pizza support line. While admittedly highly unlikely, this scenario will in many ways be familiar to fans of absurdist fiction and film. The feckless boob character with a menial job who's drawn into the plot against his will, the oddities of the landscape, the beautiful woman who can explain all - these are recognizable markers for readers of Douglas Adams, Jasper Fforde or, more recently, Gary Shteyngart. You've seen "Brazil"? You've read "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"? You'll find yourself right at home in these pages. Quirkiness abounds in Rachel Cantor's alternate universe: Distance is measured in versts and cubits, public transportation is carried out in wagonettes, and policemen wear Chipmunk Patrol sashes. Everyone has an Afro, and currency is called lucre. While not strictly nonsense, these elements give the book an Alice in Wonderland feel. Yes, we're rooting for Leonard, the customer-service rep, just like we're rooting for any schlimazel in a jam, but the satirical twist threatens to push the book in an unhappy nihilist direction: It's all random, so what does it matter? There's a coldness to whimsy that sometimes creeps into books of this stripe. All the wackiness can seem a bit mechanical and contrived. Reading a book whose author has forced his characters into random what-ifs only for the purpose of creating bizarre juxtapositions can feel like watching a remarkable dancer without a face: impressive, but ultimately soulless. Happily, "A Highly Unlikely Scenario" does not get bogged down in such empty displays of dexterity. While Cantor delights in strangeness and demonstrates a rakish disregard for sense, she's not wallowing in nonsense, nor is she dishing up whimsy just for whimsy's sake. At the center of the book, her hero is real, and his problems feel urgent. First, Leonard's human connections ring very true. His political-activist sister spends most of the novel engaged in an uprising against the Leader and his National Unity program. Leonard loves and cares for her son, Felix, with a sweetness and sincerity that pushes right through the novel's cartoonish landscape. At one point Leonard takes Felix to the bathroom, just to get them out of an awkward situation. When Felix says he doesn't really have to go, Leonard says, kindly, that since they're there, he might as well try, and Felix agrees. This one deft stroke draws both these characters firmly in flesh and blood, and Leonard's sense of responsibility to his little nephew becomes a driving force in the book. Then there is Leonard's beloved dead grandfather. Leonard was cruel to his grandfather just before his death, and he wants to make amends. Now he has a mentor from the past named Isaac the Blind, who speaks with this grandfather's voice, using his idioms and terms of endearment. Adding this warm layer to Isaac's strange instructions on time traveling and world-saving deepens the novel immeasurably. Beside some real humans, "A Highly Unlikely Scenario" delivers a real history. Rather than making up aliens or talking animals, Cantor shows us actual historical figures and events, genuine artifacts of humanity, starting with Marco Polo, or Milione, as he calls himself on the Neetsa Pizza customer complaint hotline. He may sound like a crazy person, yammering on about the Great Khan, the Desert of Lop, Saracens, Tartars. Of course his reality is only far-fetched in that it is so far back in our past that it seems foreign to us.
Library Journal Review
Cantor's debut novel melds whimsical sf with time traveling-philosophical, metaphysical, and political-in a literary equivalent of a mashup between Christopher Moore and Naguib Mahfouz. In an undetermined time and place, the world is run by the Leader (of unnamed sect), while rival fast-food chains compete for philosophical control of people's hearts and minds. The Pythagorean Neetsa Pizza chain is the employer of our erstwhile hero, Leonard, whose primary occupation is to sit in his White Room, recite Pythagorean meditations, listen to customer complaints, and relieve their pain through compassion...and pizza coupons. Leonard soon becomes embroiled in a mystery involving calls from a 13th-century explorer named Marco, dead mystics, and his own deceased grandfather, imploring him to save the world. With the help of his nephew Felix, adept at practicing awesome karate kicks but not so adept at avoiding being thrown in compost heaps, Leonard steps foot outside his White Room into the world of warring neo-Maoists, Latter-day Baconians, and Heraclitans, in search of answers-and maybe a little love. Verdict Cantor's novel will be a great hit for fans of Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe. There's a lot going on here, and all of it is amusing.-Julie Kane, Sweet Briar College Lib., VA (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
