Written earlier than the Bridget Jones books, and much deeper. Not just an interminable diary about pounds lost and gained, drinks drunk, and fellows not won; Cause Celeb is about a Bridget-like woman who transcends all that, goes to Africa to work in a refuge camp as a 20th century woman's analog of the French Foreign Legion, and discovers how unnecessary and unmerited her previous obsessive insecurity was. A charming book. I don't know why this one wasn't made into Helen Fielding's first movie instead of "Bridget." I read this one about once a year just for fun.

LOVE Helen Fielding—— usually. This was just stupid! On so many levels. Don’t waste your time on this one.

Not a total waste of time, but almost. Writing this review six months later and I can barely remember anything about the book.

I have mixed feelings about this book.
It's part chick-lit, with shallow characters and ridiculous situations, and part drama, describing a very serious humanitarian project in Africa.
The chick-lit part is nothing unique, there's the usual good-looking a**hole, who is incapable of having a functional relationship, and the woman who can't seem to break up with him, although she clearly sees she should.
The drama part is beautifully written, full of tragedy and satire, and there's some character development as well.
But somehow, the two halves just didn't come together for me.

I had never read a book about this subject matter before. It seemed like I learned something about starvation in Africa but I know it was just the tip of a very large iceberg. It definitely opened my eyes. This book was a very quick read. Simple and to the point.

In "Cause Celeb" Fielding satirizes the pretentiousness of celebrities, the not-always pure motives of humanitarians, the poetical idiosyncrasies of Africans, the tangled and futile politics of foreign aid, and the stupidity of certain women when it comes to relationships.

I enjoy Fielding's novels even though I can never manage to relate to her female protagonists, who tend to be shallow women who lack self-respect, initially have bad taste in men, readily engage in casual sex, and play relationship games, only to wonder why they suffer so much angst. I imagine Fielding is satirizing the modern, secular single woman with such characters, but somehow they always manage to end up with a good man despite never fully, completely reforming their approach to relationships.

In some ways, "Cause Celeb" is a better satire than Fielding's other books: it is certainly more raw and biting, and that is perhaps why it is not as popular as her lighter works, but that is what makes me more impressed by it. As a satire, however, it is only half formed. While half the book has that clever, biting edge, the other half is all straightforward seriousness. That's not necessarily bad, but it's a conflation of genres that jars a little. In the straightforward parts, she gets a bit heavy-handedly political at times, and although there is certainly some poetry in the telling, and some moving moments, at times the story also drags a bit, and, at other times, the message comes at the reader like a two-by-four.

I've quoted a few of my favorite lines from the book below, some satirical, and some non-ironic:

"The relationship seesaw: What would you do if it was perfectly balanced? I thought...Much better to be slightly at a disadvantage; so much more fun that way…Much better to have those passionate, tantalizing thrills than endless boring TV suppers, sitting snuggled on the sofa in jeans and an old cardi, not caring what you looked like because inside you were so sure he loved you just for you."

"As if love was something you earned like a merit star, and if I followed every single instruction in every single magazine that month…made my own pasta, studied advanced sexual gymnastics, never crowded him…Oliver might decide he was in love with me."

On the protagonists first trip to Africans: "I was shocked when I watched Live Aid…But that was a safe breed of shock…This [however:] was the shock of feeling for the first time that the world had no safety in it, that it was not governed by justice, and that nobody who could be trusted was in control. It was the shame of feeling that I shared responsibility for this horror and of breaking down and ceasing to function…"

On adjusting to ordinary western, upper class life after her initial, powerfully unsettling experience in Africa: "Quickly I grew less deranged. I had begun the process of calming down, assimilating and compromising, which is necessary to live comfortably in the world as it is, and probably is why its imbalance never changes."

On the fact that Africans, unlike Westerners, didn't care if their prosthetic limb looked real: "As long as the limb worked, they just wanted to get on with their lives. It wasn't something they bothered to disguise. Maybe this was because of the war and the proliferation of mines. I suspect it had more to do with what they valued in each other."

Το βιβλίο κυκλοφόρησε στα Ελληνικά με τίτλο Ω!τι υπέροχος κόσμος

If I'm reading chick lit I want chick lit. The author tried to put in way too much emotion for what was really a love story in the end. Also lots of characters that just didn't matter and never got developed.

http://www.bookcrossing.com/journal/5...

This is the first novel by Helen Fielding of Bridget Jones fame which she wrote in 1994. Surprisingly I never read until now. It is a satirical story full of both ridiculous and tragic events about what happens when celebrity aid comes to the help of famine relief in Africa. It is this angle that makes this novel more than just another chick lit type novel. It is I read a subject Helen Fielding is interested in and she has worked in producing documentaries for relief for such famines.
The heroine Rosie Richardson is living in London, working in publishing when we first meet her. After a disastrous relationship with Oliver Marchant a minor television celebrity who turns out to be cruel and manipulative she becomes disillusioned with her lifestyle. As a complete life change she heads for Africa to work as a Director of a refugee camp, for a charity. Four years later famine strikes and desperate for funds Rosie decides to use her celebrity acquaintances to raise emergency funds by organising a television appeal from the camp itself.
Towards the end of the novel the descriptions of the human suffering are powerful and disturbing. It is fourteen years since this novel was written and sadly many parts of the world are still suffering in such a way, despite worldwide campaigns to try and reduce such incidents.
I quote from the novel direct as I think it is an excellent reaction of the horrors as viewed by the aid workers and celebrities. ‘It was such a monumental horror that it felt as though nothing should be the same any more, nothing should continue: none of us should speak or do anything, the sun should not be moving across the sky and the wind should not blow. It did not seem possible that such a thing as this could be taking place without the world having to shudder to a halt and think again.’
This might start out seeming like a lightweight novel but it certainly does not leave you feeling that way at the end!

Sticking with the Brits, this is Fielding's first novel. Bridget Jones meets Bob Geldof, half set in London with another pretty young woman thinking herself always too fat, loving an abusive asshole, drinking a lot and freaking out about make-up and stockings and shaving, the other half with her working as an aide in a refuge camp. Since Rosie is more intelligent and competent and assertive than Bridget, even though both are creatures of the publicity and media world, and since Fielding herself has worked on documentaries about UK aid for Africa, this is plausible, and actually more welcome than the London chapters, even if those were what would later make Fielding big (even though mentions of catastrophies in Africa et al were always present, and always mixed with quite plausible results with the ditzy heroine's other exploits, humanity as the balancing stone of what is meant to be the eternal female and just makes me sad).
Fielding is more directly outspoken here - what people could read out of BJ, or ignore if they were very shallow, is here criticised more openly, e.g. weight issues and other (self/society) inflicted plagues esp. in contrast to famine. I had said after "Is That It?" that I wondered just that, what happened later, how did that aid actually work, and this book actually shows that - and Fielding says that in order to keep on living in this world, everyone keeps having to forget the hell "down there", again and again, which is why Cause Celeb can't be a hit.

It would be unfair to my other books if I gave this lots of stars, but it's also unfair how few it has - guess that's due to fans of BJ, which in retrospect seems worse, because Fielding is smart and either caved in or talked down to all those who made chick lit into a genre.

ETA-THREE: Fielding addresses some of the issues that Geldof didn't in ITI, and that came up during or after Live Aid, e.g. the starving as monkey-men. There were more uncomfortable truths that on the flipside aren't that negative - mad bastards can rise to do good, and good people don't care less about trivial things under dire circumstances, to say so would be a lie - faced with hell on Earth small personal concerns can actually become accerbated.

ETA: not only readers but critics coming to this book belatedly seem to read it oddly slanted and plain wrong ... Muhammed is a great character, O'Rourke is not a hunk, that's the point, and there are some genuinely funny scenes in the camp (the purple dog and the fungus man) and a nerve-racking finale, a minor happy end against the backround of the reality of the situation. The sad end is how Fielding predicted BJ herself in these very pages, and how the world reacted to either.

I didn't enjoy it much as I was expecting to.

Brilliant read