Cold Comfort Café

By: Gary Cox

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Warning: This book is so funny it will seriously damage your existential angst.

You’ve heard of the existentialists, now meet the sexistentialists. You’ve read At the Existentialist’s Café, now visit the Cold Comfort Café, Paris, for an Anxiety Coffee™. It’s the favourite haunt of those OTHER ginormous 20th Century French intellectuals, the EXTRAstentialists Paul-Gene Camwho and Chantilly ‘The Otter’ le Loutre. They remain the bohemian power couple par excellence, famous throughout the world and most of Paris as radical philosophers, novelists, playwrights, journalists, political activists and all-round avant-garde poseurs.

This is the one and only official autobiography of Camwho. Within its sizzling, scandalous pages the giant Parisian philosophe, chain smoker, anti-bourgeois bourgeois, occasional Marxist sympathiser and all-round self-promoting smartarse, details the extraordinary existential roller-coaster that was his remarkable, action-packed life: From his not so humble beginnings as the enfant terrible of the grandest private ecoles of Paris, to his brief exile as an infant school teacher in dreary seaside Le Hable. From his legendary first meeting with hot radical feminist and femme fatale The Otter - his lifelong scholarly sparring partner, care assistant and increasingly part-time lover - to his secret Alpine sojourn with the infamous Nazi philosopher, Prof Martini Sieg Heildigger.

What exactly, if any, was Camwho’s role in World War II? Did he really harbour secret fascist sympathies? What breathtaking loonie-left naivety led him to brutal imprisonment as Stalin’s personal guest in the Soviet Denisov Forced Labour Camp Siberia? Why didn’t he decline the Nobel Prize for Literature, and did he really smoke opium with Chairman Mao? Read about his remarkable feats of writing - especially when high on the stimulant Corybrain with a fat advance in the post from his illustrious Parisian publisher and dear friend, Garçon Malligard. Hear about his time in the USA as the guest of the novelist, alcoholic and reckless hunter, Ernie Wayinghem. Titillate yourself as you learn about Camwho’s countless affairs with a conveyer belt of sexy if often vulnerable women who loved or simply lusted after this small, ugly, boss-eyed but (luckily for him) dazzlingly clever, famous, wealthy and narcissistic literary heavyweight. Learn, finally, the shocking truth about the mysterious events surrounding his tragic, untimely death.

Camwho, in his own inimitable words, leaves us in no doubt that he was and will forever remain a towering genius, a world historic figure, a true colossus of stylo et papier, the greatest son of France, rivalled not even by Camus, Sartre, Genet or Napoleon put together.