On the HahaFiction shelf

Bad Karma

by David Safier

Mieses Karma · Book 1 · 2007

TV star Kim has made her career by trampling other people’s feelings, including those of her husband and daughter. On the night she wins a major television award, falling space-station debris kills her. She returns as an ant, with enough bad karma to make becoming human again a considerable project.

Contemporary & literary Fantasy Farce Situational comedy

From the publisher’s blurb

“Reincarnation as an ant teaches her a few lessons in humility”

Read the full description at John Beaufoy Publishing, via Midpoint

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What makes it funny?

Kim begins by ranking her death only sixth among the day’s worst experiences. Her daughter’s birthday has collided with the awards ceremony, and her account of the family argument makes her priorities painfully clear. Readers in book groups describe returning to this woman’s disastrous second chance and still finding it uproariously funny on rereading.

The comedy at work

Kim tells her own story with the sharp judgments of someone accustomed to being important. Reincarnation reduces the scale of her troubles without removing that self-importance. Casanova supplies memoir footnotes, including an ant’s account of an approaching sandal as an impending apocalypse.

Try this if…

A prospect for readers who enjoy sarcastic narrators learning humility through ridiculous physical predicaments. The German review singles out the sharp tongue and wit; the book-group recommendation emphasizes the female lead as well as the repeated laughs.

Good to know

The English edition is translated by John Brownjohn from the German Mieses Karma. Expect sexual references, infidelity, profanity and a plot driven by death and rebirth.