Description
Two men are thrown together by circumstance. As travelling B2B salesmen, they try to land a whale: a single big account with a life-changing commission. Their product — industrial enterprise software — is something no one can see or touch, and most have never heard of, yet it is essential to the developed economy. Between business calls, sales engineer Cody Lindgren keeps a private ledger in the car they they criss-cross the upper Midwest in. He writes up his account executive partner, Silas Lazzaro, every time the enigmatic merchant quotes a dead European philosopher or compares a factory to a cathedral. This account is The Swear Tax, Ivan Niccolai’s enchantingly written debut.
The Swear Tax takes the reader into the world of corporate software sales, a realm almost entirely absent from contemporary fiction. And out of its rituals, its acronyms, its freemasonry — which parallel Silas’s itinerant, patchwork life in the French Foreign Legion — Niccolai builds an original, distinctive novel in a voice that is both lyrical and disillusioned.
This is a story about the road and about the vastness and strangeness of the Midwest. It is also a moving account of male friendship and a wryly humorous reflection on the paradoxes and absurdities of contemporary culture’s clashes with itself. The Swear Tax is a panegyric to the Congolese sapeurs, and all those who understand the metaphysical significance of a well-tailored suit. Above all, it is a novel about soul-making.
