´We´re changing the world through what we do, making a positive impact, and having a blast while doing it´. How familiar does it sound to you???
I am always very curious to read more and more books about startup culture and its failures because such books and their characters say so much about my adult world and realities. As someone who worked with and for startups and with friends actively involved in this field, I can´t have enough to discover familiar tropes and hilarious ideas.
Black Buck. A novel by Mateo Askaripour is actually one of the best on this topic I´ve read in a very long time. Good both as writing and equally from the point of view of the plot and its character building. It has so many ideas so familiar for the world of startups, while creates a very unique story which is getting more and more out of control.
Meet Darren Vender, your everyday Starbucks employee, welcoming for four years on the other side of the counter his fancy coffee customers. He is black, has a stable girlfriend since....for ever, lives with his mom and does not see himself anywhere. Until Rhett, one of his regular customers, had an offer for him. An unique offer for someone without any high education: to go into sales, at a startup with meeting rooms named as Qu´ran, Bhagavad Gita or Torah. Sumwun sells some special employee mental care packages, which are aimed at countering the classical therapy. There, Darren will be asked to charge his name to Buch - from...Starbucks - and get used with it. Also, to get used with a lot of money coming and going through the company, crazy trainings and employees bringing their piglet pets at work. In few months, his entire life changes and the changes seem to have no limit.
This attempt to push the limits of fiction - and of the plot - makes, among others, this book so different from many other startup-themed books. It develops into a criminal and financial thriller, with such a grotesque touch that one may not know if laughing or crying or both are the normal reactions.
Mateo Askaripour has no limits in painting this new order in the making and has a good kind of crazy way to say things: For instance, this description of Rhett´s house: ´His ceiling was a grattified version of the Sistine Chapel´s, coincidentally spray-painted by an artist who also went by the name Michelangelo´. Or this description of the morning traffic in Manhattan: ´slower than loading porn with dial-up in the nineties´. Last but not least, this detail about another startup guy, Barry, who masturbates every day to the view of the Statue of Liberty. The book is sometimes graphic but does not feel like it is extra, it´s just how things are and react together.
The inter-textuality and the various inferences of story fragments are taking place very often, and one may be very careful when reading to do not miss some important, mostly time-related, details. Buck is writing the book as a story of his life adventures, ´from the penthouse of a one-hundred-one-year-old building worth millions of dollars that overlooks Central Park´, which is Lincoln Correctional Facility, an institution which belongs to the larger category of ´Prison´.
As much as I literally savoured the book, the general timeline for the story - 12 months, I´ve found a bit unrealistic. Indeed, there are so many things that in those fast-forwarding world can happen within a year, but what is happening in this story is not credible. A larger timeframe would have been a much better choice, in my humble reade´s opinion. At a great extent, this time compression alters the sense of many events and thus alters the story itself.
I´ve also felt that some of the characters are unidimensional or just introduced in the story to make it look bigger, but this is the risk of having too many persons in the narrative.
Black Buck was on my TBR - built based on various inter-crossed recommendations - for a long time and I am glad I´ve finally succeeded to read it. Besides aiming high on my list of startup-related readings this book also showed how much your writing can lead you in creating a - crazy - world. Just a small fragment of our start-up world.
Rating: 3.5 stars
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