Виллем Элсхот — последние издания книг

When the ambitious but inept clerk Frans Laarmans is offered a job managing an Edam distribution company in Antwerp, he jumps at the chance, despite his professed dislike for cheese in all its forms. He soon finds himself submerged in a bureaucratic nightmare as his complete incompetence becomes apparent. Meanwhile, his offices fill up with a seemingly infinite supply of the distinctive red-skinned cheeses, which he has no idea how to sell.
Skewering the pomposity of big business while revealing how an entrepreneurial spirit can often be a mask for buffoonery, Willem Elsschot’s Cheese combines comedy and pathos in its depiction of a man trying to progress beyond his limited skill set. As poignant as it is funny, Cheese will appeal to anyone who has suffered the endless indignities of office life.

Cheese is a gentle, satirical fable of capitalism and wealth. A clerk in Antwerp suddenly becomes the chief agent in Belgium and Luxembourg for Edam cheese and is saddled with 10,000 wheels of the red-rinded delight. But he has no idea how to run a business or how to sell his goods, and what’s more, he doesn’t even like cheese. Steeped in the atmosphere of the 1930s, an era of smart operators and failed businessmen, Cheese gracefully portrays the rigid class divisions of the time and a man’s obsession with status. This comic masterpiece about the perils of upward mobility is as relevant in the age of Internet investors and dot-com failures as it was when it was written.

Книга бельгийского писателя Виллема Элсхота включает в себя романы «Вилла роз» и «Силки», а также повести «Сыр», «Танкер», «Блуждающий огонёк». Книги Элсхота, отмечают критики, — это «автобиографии чувства», это ищущая себе возможные «алиби» тайная исповедь автора.