A Great book for your teenager, or pre-teen. This book gives a realistic tale of life, and war in medieval times. Tales of great European heros such as Roland, and King Arthur. The book also talks about the infrastructure of society under "feudalism". Very informative and easy to digest. This book needs to be reprinted ASAP.

If this tour de force were a short story, part of a collection, I'd have liked it better. It's too light-weight to take seriously as a separate publication. Jonathan Noel, the main character, is a timid and tidy man who has lived in the same 11 x 7 room for thirty years. One morning he opens the door to his room and finds a pigeon sitting there. This leads to total disruption in his predictable life, his personal unraveling, and his decision to live elsewhere for a few days. If you can identify with this, you are a better person than I!

Located in contemporary Paris, "The Pigeon" is the story of an incident. A dull Frenchman discovers one day the unexpected presence of a pigeon in front of the small roomm he inhabits. This minuscule and seemingly irrelevant event adopts terrifying proportions in the mind of the man, becoming a grotesque nightmare.

As a master of allusion and obsession, Suskind reveals once more, in this parable of everyday life, his gift for building a metaphor of the existential background of humans. It shows that our life usually holds to rutines so fragile, that a simple disturbance may force us to rethink everything from the start. It is a short book, but an intriguing and absurd tale. The absurd, seems to say Suskind, is present in the most simple things that happen every day.

Imagine you are an old man so afraid of life that you have spent most of your years alone, living in a small room and working in an insignificant job as a security guard on the front steps of a bank, your only pleasure somehow derived from the monotony of your daily routine. Then one day a living creature, a pigeon, appears unexpectedly on your doorstep, and it shouldn't be there--it is out of place. And this frightens you like nothing has in many years. You flee your apartment (for good, you think). Because of your agitated state you break your own routines; you begin acting strangely, and your perceptions alter. This sets off a chain reaction of encounters in which you, despite your lifelong precautions to the contrary, begin interacting with a world that seems determined to drive you over the edge.

Suskind's "The Pigeon" is subtly meticulous in depicting its protagonist's complex psychological journey. The story is at once free of sentimentality, raw, honest, and yet life-affirming in the most vital sense. While it is reminiscent of Kafka and--most notably--of Knut Hamson's "Hunger," Suskind's novella also manages to glimpse something just around the corner, something almost out of sight, beyond the valley of despair.