Dan Yack

by Blaise Cendrars

Book Overview

Centering on eccentric English millionaire shipowner, notorious hell-raiser, and the envy of all St Petersburg, Dan Yack, this strange travel yarn begins with the protagonist finding out that he is no... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0935576223
• ISBN13: 9780935576221
• Release Date: January 1987
• Publisher: Michael Kesend Publishing, Limited
• Length: 144 Pages
• Weight: 0.78 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Something different, and great

Great authors and great books are monstrous, they elicit the horror and wonder of coming upon a strange beast on the same walk one takes every day. So to with Dan Yack. The fiction is a machine spurning delusions, daydreams and spirals of desire that run up to castles in the clouds and pits of lava in the depths. One is quite sure that you are in the hands of madman reading this, just as the characters IN the novel are quite obviously in the grips of one, Dan Yack. The novel takes you places geographically, but more so emotionally and in the imagination. It seems out of control at times and you are held on the tender edge of frustration and rapture, wondering what the author's going on about, knowing it's something, leading somewhere. Sometimes there is the taste of real life and sometimes it's the most ludicrous invention. You're not sure which impression you feel cheated by. And then it all comes together in a windfall of emotion that expresses clearly what's been pulsing beneath the surface the whole time--this is a work whose every word is impregnated with a deep, moral sense of what it is to be alive, and it risks everything to communicate that sense. And succeeds brilliantly. (Excuse the vague, emotional tone of this review. I'm sure others have hinted at what it's about in a more 'concrete sense. This is how it felt to me.)

What would you do with true wealth?

Dan Yack is a lavish exercise in inheritance by the extremely entertaining author Blaise Cendrars. Cendrars, one alias of Frederic Sauser, could easily be Yack. He is an ebullient traveller whose life can hardly be extricated from his fiction. If you've ever read anything written about him, you might have some idea of the difficulty biographers face in dealing with this subject. Dan Yack is the well funded son of a shipping magnate, who decides to take his millions to Russia and spend his days drinking and spending. While there, he wakes up under a table where three artists (a painter, a composer, and a sculpter) are lamenting over the sad state of he arts and how difficult it is to make money as an artist. He climbs out from under the table, where he had been inspecting their shoes, to right the ineffable wrongs that have been done to these gentlemen. After handing each of them a blank check, Yack urges them to meet in London in 6 months to depart for Antarctica, where they will spend a season gathering inspiration. The choice is theirs. What follows is the tale of the three artists, Yack, and his dog going insane in the arctic winter. For anyone who has ever wondered why the rich never do anything truly entertaining with their money, for all the people who have pondered how big a plum pudding can get, and for all those who have dreamed of picking a place to live by firing a pistol at a globe, you have Dan Yack.

From love to action and contemplation

(Sorry for my poor english...)If you liked the marvelous Moravagine, Dan Yack could be considerated in a way as is soft counterpart. When a group of depraved artits decide to follow an idle billionnaire to spend a winter near the south pole, anything can happen. And, of course, as we are in the Blaise Cendrars world, it happens in a brutal, hallucinating but touching way. Dan Yack plays with life like a gambler who would play russian roulette with a gun loaded with five bullets.