Samper teeters comically on the fulcrum of his self-regard between two familiar types: He is dandy and ass both. Consequently, when satire flags, he keeps things moving by falling on his prat, memorably in "Fernet Branca" in a privy, down a mountainside.
His hoots at the cheesy world he surveys are even choicer than his tumbles. He rails at today's "riffraff culture of hooliscruffs and yobbigans," at beachgoers with "graceless bulbosities creakingly restrained by wisps of designer nylon" -- well, really, most of humanity who live downslope from Casa Samper. Certainly, his distaste for his work seems wholly credible. Imagine, really, how stupefying a colloquy with A-Rod might be.
"Amazing Disgrace" begins with Samper embroiled in another detested project, the life and times of Millie Cleat. Millie is a celebrated solo ocean sailor -- doughty, "spiritual," shamelessly self-promoting (Samper imagines her "filling the tub in her Hilton suite in order to practise walking on water"). If that were insufficient gall to Samper, she does it all with a conspicuous handicap -- she's missing an arm, lost to a shark. So, with Samper in foulest fettle, the reader naturally embarks with high spirits. Unfortunately, where "Fernet B ranca" rollicked, only occasionally flounder ing in plot complications, "Disgrace" wallows almost from the start.
Very early, there is a digression (later woven into the story) that demonstrates the severe limitations of oceanography as comic genre (at one point, Samper as narrator actually apologizes for the tedium of events). Even after we recover from this, too many of the gags are delivered sluggishly, and there are too few passages of brilliant dyspepsia, as in the earlier book, delivered at such a pitch that Samper's merest grunts are funny. One potent scatological set-up is allowed to merely poop out somewhere mid-book.
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