wasabinoir

Ernie Farragut is a hard-boiled political operative who works as a fixer for a political machine in Los Angeles and lives a monastic life in East Los Angeles.His dark view of human nature and spiritual enervation lead him into an agoraphobic spiral in which he finds himself discarding artifacts of his existence and heading toward oblivion.

On the leading edge of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, a seductive client sends him to Iraq in search of why a political opponent wants to obtain mysterious Sumerian seals from the vaults of Iraq's National Museum.The ill-fated job leaves him bloody and confused.Now he must overcome his angst to find out why is being pursued by a chain-smoking Russian agent, a maniacal right-wing militia leader, a hapless Chinese cryptographer, a French paratrooper with a 40-year vendetta and an old British Labour Party activist who straddles the ideological fence between East and West.

Along the way, he realizes that many of the explanations will be found only in the roots in his childhood and that redemption for his squandered life can only come from friendship and empathy for those around him.

Carnival of Fools wrestles with the post-modern questions of existence posed by Thomas Pynchon and Paul Auster.The point-of-view is designed to pull the reader into a world of coincidence, the precarious nature of identity and the self-consciousness of meta-fiction.The aesthetics of skid-row poet Charles Bukowski and hard-boiled crime writers Raymond Chandler and James Cain give the novel its emotional framework.Repeating symbols include the carnival (degradation and permissive chaos), sacred documents/memetics (conspiracy as a search for meaning), fear and redemption.