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The Soft Exile
The Soft Exile
The Soft Exile
Ebook268 pages3 hours

The Soft Exile

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

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With the publication of his debut novel, The Soft Exile, writer/musician Eric Kiefer ended a five-year, 12,000 mile exodus.

The fictional memoir draws heavily from his experience as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Gobi Desert region of Mongolia. During this time, Kiefer gathered the raw material and life experiences that would later become The Soft Exile.

The book chronicles an idealistic, young American’s decision to join the Peace Corps after an aborted suicide attempt. He spends two years as a TEFL volunteer in the fabled lands of the Mongolian desert-steppe, searching for redemption and an alternative to modern American life. Along the way, he constructs a low-powered radio station and tries his best to go native, all the while lusting for an answer to a question that will either doom or save everything... “What is the value of a good deed?”

“Word for word, it’s not exactly what happened to me out there,” Kiefer said of Soft Exile. “But it’s about as close as you can get without becoming a confession. It’s a novel for the expatriates within us all.”

LanguageEnglish
PublisherEric Kiefer
Release dateNov 28, 2015
ISBN9781311981578
The Soft Exile
Author

Eric Kiefer

Eric Kiefer is an award-winning wordsmith, a modern-day troubadour and a 20-year factotum.Apparently, the dude has a way with words. His debut novel “The Soft Exile” was named as one of the “Books We Loved in 2012” by the East Bay Express, and his journalism has earned awards from the New Jersey Press Association and the NJ Society of Professional Journalists. He is the writer behind “Your Seed For The Moon: A Graphic Novella.”Kiefer is also a unique one-man-band and singer-songwriter. His discography includes his funk-folk-tinged debut album, “The Spectre and the Dozer,” his poetry/music mashup, “Spoken Word For The Doomed,” and the tongue-in-cheek collection of oddities, “Life is Soup. I'm a Fork.”His work also includes the concept album, “The New Zeitgeist: Songs From The Zombie Apocalypse” and its accompanying e-book, “The New Zeitgeist: A Tale From The Zombie Apocalypse.”The wordsmith and troubadour is equally as proud of more than a decade of blue-collar work experience, which includes jobs at almost a dozen local gas stations, fast food joints and supermarkets, as well as gigs as a mall Christmas elf, a highway road flagger, a kennel attendant and a pancake-house waiter.Learn more about the artist and download awesome stuff at www.TheKiefer.com

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Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
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  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    (Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this review, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)Peace Corps memoirs are surprisingly tricky to pull off, for the same reason that all stories about young people going on international trips are tricky to pull off; because despite the apparent uniqueness embedded in that particular story, these "unique" elements in fact tend to repeat themselves from one story like this to the next, meaning that it's more important than ever that that author infuse that story with the kinds of great literary touches that mark a superior writer, unfortunately missing in most of these cases because of the young authors mostly being dilettantes who happen to have one interesting true story on their hands. And all of this is certainly the case with Eric Kiefer's disappointing The Soft Exile, which sets the wrong tone even from the very first page, in that the author decided to start this realistic story with a bit of absurdist humor, thus making it unclear what the overall tone of the book is supposed to be in the first place. (It's mostly the real-sounding story of a young man who spends two years in Mongolia; but the reason he makes this decision is because of calling a suicide prevention hotline one night in despair and being berated by a volunteer for being a worthless American douchebag, such a silly and unrealistic touch that it can only be treated as a bizarro comedy, making it difficult to figure out whether the rest of the ho-hum story is supposed to also be absurdist or a straightahead memoir.) Like many of these kinds of stories, huge portions of The Soft Exile read not like a three-act novel but rather as letters home to family, filled with the kinds of inconsequential details that someone's parents might enjoy learning but not a stranger reading a full-length book; and also like a lot of these kinds of stories, our main character often comes across as clueless about and sometimes even perversely proud of his douchebaggy white-middle-class behavior, making this ironically an anti-villain story* only without the author being aware that that's what he's writing. (*Anti-villain story: When a main narrator starts out as likeable if not strange, but slowly becomes more and more despicable as the book continues, done on purpose in such famous examples as A Confederacy of Dunces but often accidentally in Peace Corps memoirs and other "rah rah frat boys!" kind of books.) A valiant effort but a book that widely misses its mark, it does not come recommended to a general audience.Out of 10: 6.4

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The Soft Exile - Eric Kiefer

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