book review comments apprec.
Enter the Clan Jiyapsi (pronounced "jee-up-suh-ee""), former Algerian nomads-cum-rags to riches story. The story focuses around two of the youngest Jiyapsis, Cekrallbe and Skrp-shrilla. Skrp-shrilla (prnounced "shup-allah") was adopted into the large Jiyapsi tribe, and is constantly harrassed for his unsightly left arm, which dangles from his shoulder uselessly; the reader assumes Skrp-shrilla's left arm, like a sticky piece of garbage that stays attached to your shoulder throughout one's life, should have been amputated when he was born. Instead his short, shribbled knub of an arm flails about with every step Skrp-shrilla takes, to the horror of passersby and filthy prostitutes whose favor Skrp-shrilla is always seeking, and whose shoes he is always stealing, providing comic occasional comic relief and certain torment for the prostitutes left to walk on bare feet sure to become gangrenous after having shunned Skrp-shrilla and his "moldy rope" of a left arm. Skrp-shrilla and his brother Cekrallbe, who, like his pet rodent Gnoshpen, the brawny sewer rat, is a worthy fencing partner who never knows when to stop yakking, is long on lugubrious self pity, yet inexplicably short on genuine altruism; readers are left pluming the seemingly bottomless pit that seems to comprise the living allowances of the dogged young Jiyapsi cousins, whose well-timed and kindly donations to the 700 Club's Thanksgiving Telethon Praiseathon provide a much needed relief (for those of us who vicariously delight in the fictional holiday charity givings of wealthy viewers of Pat Robertson's supremely important telethons).
