The Dud Avocado (Virago Modern Classics)

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The Dud Avocado opens with our beautiful and hapless heroine--imagine the panache of Holly Golightly crossed with the naive knowingness of Holden Caulfield--wandering one September morning through Paris in an evening dress. She has a rich-as-Midas uncle who tells her if she goes to college, really goes to college, and finishes, she can go to France for two years.

It has young broke (but not poor) white people bumming around Europe, and when the plot isn't happening there are a lot of descriptions of the artistic milieu of Paris and the random debauched nightlife.Most of the first chapter is a really long scene between the narrator and her new crush as they chat at a Paris café.

Her selfishness is only a little curtailed by the theft of her passport and the underhand and abusive behaviour of one of her circle. The novel was based on Dundy's own experiences living in Paris and follows the misadventures of Sally Jay Gorce, a 21-year-old American graduate having love affairs and trying to break into the film industry in France.As Ernest Hemingway wrote in a letter to the author, "I liked the way your characters all speak differently. To her surprise Teddy takes the news badly as his wife has recently left him and he hoped to marry Sally Jay. Charming, sexy, and hilarious, The Dud Avocadogained instant cult status when it was first published and it remains a timeless portrait of a woman hell-bent on living. After that it is more similar to a beat novel with a female protagonist travelling around Paris looking for love and passion. The Dud Avocado opens with our beautiful and hapless heroine—imagine the panache of Holly Golightly crossed with the naive knowingness of Holden Caulfield—wandering one September morning through Paris in an evening dress.

The intent of the narrative is to be light-hearted and comedic, which I suppose it accomplishes on a seldom basis, but the negatives outweigh any of the positives for this book. At times I enjoyed the journey I was on and then there were times I just felt lost and unsure of what will happen next. Adventures keep everything jangling along and what eventually transpires is that self-told tale of the graduate Ingenue, a wittily antic amble through the foothills of (what emerges as) adulthood. unfortunately, for me the book began to drag while she was there, and i found the ending was rushed, grafted on, and out of sync with the rest of the book, though i expect fans of happy endings will find it just right. And goodness gracious, Americans who can afford have been living a self-conscious vie de Boheme in Paris for decades.A junior sophisticate, in her tingling pursuit of people, places and upper case Experience provides a diverting first novel, which for all its purposeful naivete and scattered trivia is also deceptively clever. With a couple of exceptions, the male characters are all like the avocado eater: endlessly patronizing as they pat the narrator’s hand, ruffle her hair, invite friends for dinner (“You can’t cook…why, good Lord, Sally Jay, I thought every girl knew how to cook,” p. Its modern version is the female jocks, alongside which a good friend of mine had to live before she escaped from the single person dorm rooms and into our shared apartment, who disregarded the need for regular sleep schedules of neighbors, had sex on the communal sinks, and left used condoms on the tank covers of the communal toilets. I do recommend getting this edition, when I glimpse the cover on my bookshelf, it brings back that sense of adventure and joy from the life I shared with Sally.

happily knowing that the mocking is often naïve, and also that the target of the joke is going to be the narrator. This is a favorite of his, and I certainly wasn't disappointed - you'd be hard pressed to find a better light reading experience. The relatable, although perhaps not always very likeable protagonist, Sally Jay, is a woman who might not always know exactly what she wants but goes about pursuing her dreams and desires anyway, usually on a whim.Dying her hair pink, she struts around town in her failed outfits (stubbornly dividing them into three looks: Tyrolean Peasant, Bar Girl, and Dreaded Librarian), she sets out to put the Parisians to shame with her antics. I began floating down those Elysian Fields three inches off the ground, as easily as a Cocteau character floats thru Hell.