Big Snake Little Snake by DBC Pierre review – like a pub conversation about life, fate and the universe

The Booker prize-winner continues to indulge himself in a rage against metrics – but after a couple of decades of choppy form, that’s not necessarily a bad thing

DBC Pierre’s new book is part memoir, part grand-theory-of-everything: 29 liquid vignettes looped around his time in Trinidad, where he makes an ad with a parrot. The parrot is mostly by the by. Big Snake Little Snake, subtitled “An Inquiry into Risk”, is the Booker prize-winning author’s tenuous premise to tell you everything he thinks about chaos, life and fate. It reads like a very long conversation with a stranger at a pub, except it is good.

“Dirty But Clean” Pierre (nom de plume of Australian Peter Finlay) finds a literal Little Snake on the doormat of his island home. Little Snake, he finds out, is also #27 in Trinidad and Tobago’s lottery game, Play Whe – and thenceforth Pierre’s spirit guide to the “vibrant maths” of the universe. This loose symbology sets the tone for the book: sparkling, good-natured conspiracy theories, wheeling haphazardly around something deeper.

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/dZY2xqp
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