karlmarx. com: A Love Story - Hardcover

Susan Coll's articles and reviews have appeared in the International Herald Tribune, The Washington Post Book World, and The Asian Wall Street Journal. She lives in Maryland with her husband, the author and journalist Steve Coll, and their three children.

A 20th-century graduate student discovers that she and Karl Marx's daughter are doppelg„ngers in this heartfelt but awkward debut novel. Modern-day Ella Kennedy is a Ph.D. candidate struggling to complete her dissertation on Eleanor Marx before her wealthy father cuts her off. To support herself, Ella lands a job at a consulting firm called the Institute of Thought, whose sole client a group known as the Neoclassicists for Universal Thought and Study (NUTS) wants Ella to set up a Web site hawking Karl Marx merchandise. She soon falls in love with a stammering, attractive Englishman (who happens to looks just like Hugh Grant), despite the fact that he's married. He moves in with her, refuses to talk about his past and begins writing an existentialist play set in a discount store. As this untenable situation deteriorates, Ella begins to pick up disturbing echoes of her life in the history of Eleanor Marx, who fell in with a no-good Englishman of her own a century before. Will Ella share Eleanor's tragic fate? By the end, the question is leached of interest, overwhelmed by Coll's labored humor and by the meandering story line. Most problematic is the wildly inconsistent tone: sometimes the novel reads like satire (TV crews camp outside Ella's workplace hoping to catch a glimpse of what they believe is America's last remaining Marxist), and at other times, it reads like the most banal kind of realism (for example, giving far too much detail on Ella's failure to understand PageMaker and HTML). The novel has potential the irony of exploiting Marx for financial gain is a promising premise, as is the aimlessness of a young woman without a cause but it never quite reaches fruition. Agent, Melanie Jackson.

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