Ellmann tickles me just so, but while I laughed and gasped and shook my head wonderingly at various times reading Man or Mango?, on the whole it left me perplexed. This is Ellman's third book, and it strikes me as an important one in her corpus. (If I can be permitted such an assertion, having only read three of her books.) (Man I love the word "corpus".) Whereas Varying Degrees of Hopelessness was slight and occasionally tentative, Man or Mango? marks the point at which Ellmann became more or less completely unmoored from the conventions of literary fiction as she is practised. And thank god for that, frankly. There's nothing here resembling traditional "character development", the narrative mode shifts constantly, and Ellmann throws in all manner of stylistic parody and quotation (attributed and otherwise). As for story, well, is there one? Yet Ellmann's gift for combining invective and agonisingly blunt assessments of the human condition kept me turning the pages. And yet, the novel doesn't gel. Unlike Dot in the Universe, which refines the techniques developed here, Man or Mango? is loose and directionless. Yet - don't mind me, I'm transforming into a yeti - I can't dislike a novel that contains passages such as this:"Everything is so vivid to a child. They're receptive because they're ignorant: they have no idea what a great swindle is in store for them. This is why their smiles move us so. (But it's the smiles of adults that should move us. How can they smile?)"Misanthropes, represent!
When i started reading this book, I actually thougt i wouldn't finish it. It had a lot of quotes, lists and titbits about bees in between the book, that I wondered how all that encapsulates the story about Eloise and George. Eloise is one frustated lady ,weird with hermit like tendancies that are beyond crazy. She hates men, human company, anything that would require her to care about anybody. At some point she had me thinking 'Is there really a time in a woman's life where every man seems attractive just because your sexually frustated? Interesting book, am glad Eloise got to have a few moments of happiness in her life cause that would be depressing. What made me think she was a goner is when she would watch an ant for 3 days in a row, following its movements-I mean who does that? All in all it was. really funny.
Do You like book Man Or Mango? (1999)?
Eloise, with umlaut, is a self-hating woman of private means who loathes leaving the house. Speaking to the mailman causes her hours of trauma, as do basic phone or street interactions, particularly those with negative outcomes. She curls up with her cats making lists when she isn’t fretting about washing her hair. George, her ex, is an American poet composing an epic on ice hockey whose chauvinism is coming to an end with an acute case of writer’s block. After a hundred pages of existential cramp, the action switches to Connemara, Ireland, where a slew of oddities muscle into the narrative for a deeply disappointing murder mystery weekend experience. Ellmann’s third novel is her weakest—a shambling arrangement of back-and-forth character destructions with flipping narrative positions, replete with embedded quotations from Yeats, Melville, and bee studies. The emotional truffles on offer include the prickling hints at Eloise’s guilt at helping murder her parents, and the beastliness of her hermit grandmother, but ostensibly this is a story about two mad people who stop being mad for two minutes to realise they’re painfully in love. Some delightfully acerbic, compulsive and manic writing here. (And if you haven’t done so yet, go and read Dot in the Universe).
—MJ Nicholls
Man or Mango? follows the mishaps of a middle-aged misanthrope as she copes with the horrors of a social existence. Eloise, the heroine of this novel, spends her days calculating the time it will take her to mentally recover from encounters with the mailman and trying to forget her former lover George, a poet and pinball enthusiast. These characters and the novel’s weird obsessions (bees, hockey, and the Holocaust) would make this book flat out fun if it weren’t for Ellmann’s heartbreakingly accurate observations about the havoc loneliness and anxiety wreak on a person’s life. A comic novel for people who don’t mind uncomfortably exact portrayals of freaks and all-caps rants about MYSOGNY.
—Lane Pybas
