One of my favorite books
Rating:
5 / 5
This is the first book I read by this author, and it is great!
I have since read most of his other works and they are also very good. Rag Man, Ring Game, Drawing Dead, Short Money, Doohickey are all worth reading, but The Mortal Nuts, for me, is the best.
He has written some books more for children that I have not been interested in.
This is just a great read!
run out of Hiaasens?
Rating:
4 / 5
In the carnival midway of literature, you'll find Pete Hautman somewhere between Raymond Chandler and Raymond Queneau, wandering from attraction to attraction in a half-serious scavenger hunt for zany characters and offbeat plot twists.
Set at the Minnesota State Fair, The Mortal Nuts features a calculatedly improbable dramatis personae: Axel Speeter, a surly septuagenarian with a cash fortune stuffed into coffee cans; his buddy, donut mogul Tommy Fabian; Sophie Roman, Axel's stand manager and sometime bedfellow; Carmen, her Valium-popping daughter; Carmen's skinhead beau, an ex-con by name of James Dean; and a motley montage of characters that only a fair could bring together.
Treating these characters like human balloon-animals, Hautman twists them into a believably unbelievable caper plot that's fluffily engaging - and shamelessly unprofound - from beginning to end.
The Mortal Nuts is like a day at the fair, eating junk food and people-watching: it's by turns lighthearted and sordid, violent and naive, cheesy and sincere, frivolous and satisfying. No meaning-of-life headaches here - just a colorful, entertaining diversion.
Mortally funny...
Rating:
4 / 5
Axel Speeter seems weird by most people's standards, but he seems to have everything under control, and likes it just fine. He's lived in a room at a Motel 6 for as long as he can remember. He keeps all of his clothes and personal belongings in milk crates and Folger's coffee cans stacked along one wall. He mistrusts banks and his life savings of $266,000 can also be found in those coffee cans. He runs a taco concession at the Minnesota State Fair. And his surrogate family consists of one of his workers, and her college-age daughter.In Richard Hautman's Mortal Nuts, things seem just swell until Carmen (Speeter's surrogate daughter and sometimes druggie college student) mentions to her ex-convict, Aryan Nation boyfriend that Speeter keeps large sums of cash in his room. This sets off a chain of events that start at the beginning of the fair and lasting the weekend and a half that the fair runs. Hautman is a master at oddball characters, and there are more than enough of them in Mortal Nuts. It's also fun to see the workings of the Minnesota State Fair-from the food concessions and the freak shows, to the show animals and the rides. It truly is a world unknown to many readers, myself included. This is my second Peter Hautman, and he continues to grow on me with each book I read.
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