In Switzerland, a young man befriends Vlad, an exiled poet who has spent forty years translating the poetic canon of his homeland. But the young man is under the thrall of Max, a businesswoman who trades in algorithms and false promises; at his request she writes a simple piece of code that completes Vlad’s grand project in an afternoon.
Ten years later, the young man has arrived at adulthood entirely unprepared. On a Monday he meets a woman at a court-mandated remedial driving course; by Friday she is pregnant. Their baby won’t stop screaming and nobody can tell them why. Desperate, he calls on his long-absent father, a lapsed missionary and would-be artist, to come home.
When Vlad is posthumously nominated for the world’s richest literary award, the young man discovers that Vlad’s poems feature a recurring character – the Fruit Fly – who bears an uncomfortable resemblance to himself. Soon he is invited to Switzerland to speak on Vlad’s behalf. His father tags along, intrigued by his son’s sudden adjacency to greatness, and not immune to the prospect of a little of his own . . .
THE EXILE is a darkly funny novel about artists and frauds, literary taste-making, and the temptation of a little late-breaking immortality. A sharp satire of the machinery that turns artists into legends, it asks what we inherit, what we invent – and what any of us really know about the people we love.
