Synopsis:
"When an unknown black poodle inexplicably explodes in philosophy professor Timothy Chesterton-Brown's back yard--paralyzing the professor and killing his guest--the "mystery of the sardine" begins. Its solution will involve such unwitting detectives as a twelve-year-old mathematician, his mother, his beloved, a palmist named Miss Prentice, and a bureaucrat dubbed the Minister of Imponderabilia. The clues they unearth--drawing on logic, the occult, intuition, and everything in between--lead them far away from the tiny seaside town where they begin. We follow them to Majorca, Rome, Warsaw, and London, but in the end, the solution lies beyond even the furthest and most magical reaches of reason."

Sounds like an interesting book. I will not read it (now), because I have a huge MTBR and it would be unfair to let someone wait a long time for a Christmas present.
So, this one is going to..... because of this spring / summer's action :-) Thank you so much for sending these books to me, I am very happy with them!

Thank you very much for the books you sent to me.
I did not get 'round to read them yet, but they have a good home. I'll try to climb MTBR next year, make it lower and send on the books again.

Hope you enjoy the book!

Merry Christmas!

Hooray! What an interesting-looking book. Thanks Boeken Trol!

This is a note on both The Mystery of the Sardine and Hobson's Island, Stefan Themerson's two final novels before his death in 1988. According to the introduction to the latter, the previous thing that Themerson had published was an essay suggesting that a university should fund a "Chair of Decency". "Contrary to what clergymen and policemen want us to believe, gentleness is biological, and aggression is cultural; not vice versa.... All ideologies, all missions, all aims corrupt.... Because, when all is said and done, decency of means is the aim of aims." These are themes emphasized over and over in Hobson's Island and, to a less obvious extent, in The Mystery of the Sardine. They are books written by someone who is not afraid to turn conversations into philosophy lectures, for whom characters are vehicles for ideas, and whose plots are quite deliberately ridiculous; after all, nothing could be more absurd than the human predicament in that Cold War age when all ideologies and all reason had led to the brink of global annihilation. To judge by these novels, Themerson seems similar to one of the characters in Hobson's Island, Sean D'Earth: a reluctant atheist who thinks there ought to have been a just God, and a betrayed lover of science who sees his beautiful vision of evolution thriving on the love of parent to child cruelly perverted by weapon-builders. Yet, until the despairing end of the second book, the mood is mostly one of gentle, if uneasy, lunacy, in which terrifying events can be overcome by those characters (mostly women) who understand that "Axioms are mortal, politics are mortal, poetry is mortal, – good manners are immortal."

On the Book Swap shelf.

Never Judge a Book by Its Cover Challenge, 2012 Week 31 (Food)