The Defenestration of Bob T. Hash III
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b) Besides being the author and illustrator of the language course book, you suffer from an extremely rare medical condition whereby you sometimes enter a coma so profound that it is virtually impossible to distinguish it from mortal demise. Such an episode has just occurred and you are now in the deepest of comas where, though dead to the outside world (but still under pressure of a very real publishing deadline), you continue to work on the gobbledygook grammar book scenarios in your comatose dreamscape.
c) Bamboozled by relentless marketing pressures, you have parted with a vast sum of the local currency for what turns out to be a shoddy half-baked but immaculately presented course in foreign language instruction. You are now overidentifying with the picture book characters and the stories around them to the point where you are no longer able to distinguish between your own reality and that of the picture book. In a fit of paranoid delusion you decide that the only way to remain in the picture book is to push the tycoon protagonist and his golf bag out a window.
d) Rather than it being you inside the grammar book, it is in fact the grammar book that has got inside of you. An irrepressible babble of voices from within prompts you to speech pattern distortions, the substitution of perfectly good English terms and phrases with unwarranted foreign translations, and the po-faced elaboration of red herring subplots.
e) (variant of possibility a in First Steps) With your favorite tweed-upholstered armchair drawn up to a glowing hearth side, you are in the upstairs library of your country residence. Puffing away on your pipe, you chortle over a vellum-bound volume of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland resting merrily in your lap. Suddenly, not far from the beginning, a phrase concerning a long-eared bobtailed furry rodent mammal of the Leporidae family famed for its predilection for gregarious breeding that burrows under golf courses and is delicious with onions sends you urgently padding over in your carpet slippers to an alcoved set of candlelit polyglot bookshelves to follow up on the reference. On removal of The Observer Book of Rabbits White from its perch (as from a hat), the bookshelf unit swivels inward to reveal a secret torch-lit passageway connecting at length with Mr. Hash’s executive office (emerging from the office filing cabinet, section N–Z).
f) You have actually always been in the picture book. No explanation is therefore required.
Now write a novel that you might like to anchor in one or in some combination of the above scenarios (student may also use scenarios from First Steps) that, by giving grammatical guidance, illustrative examples, student exercises, etc., might not only provide an entertaining read but prove useful as teaching material in its own right for the benefit of class.
About the Author
DAVID DEANS was born and raised in Edinburgh, Scotland, and educated at the University of Aberdeen and the London School of Economics. He has spent many years abroad teaching English as a second language and currently lives in Italy.
The Defenestration of Bob T. Hash III is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2008 by David Deans
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Deans, David
The defenestration of Bob T. Hash III: a novel/David Deans.
p. cm.
1. Title.
PR6054.E233D44 2008
823'.914—dc22 2007039972
www.atrandom.com
eISBN: 978-1-58836-700-6
v3.0