Customer Reviews

Hey Nostradamus!

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(21)
3 star:		(13)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Coupland's eighth novel Hey Nostradamus! opens with the Columbine-esque massacre of students in a Vancouver high school in 1988. It is an event related to us through the beautifully woven-together narrative fragments of Cheryl Anway who we soon realise is herself a victim of the tragedy. Cheryl has recently secretly married her boyfriend Jason Klaasen in Las Vegas, and that morning discovers she is pregnant with his baby. What follows are three further narratives covering the thirty years which take us from the eighties to the present day. We see Jason 12 years on, still clearly unable to come to terms with Cheryl's death and having taken on a hermit-like existence; then Heather, Jason's new girlfriend struggling to deal with his disappearance; and finally Reg, Jason's fanatically religious father whose coda brings us to the present day.

Many inches have been dedicated to discussing the relevance of Columbine to this text and as a result the novel has been criticised for failing to address the psychology of the teenagers who commit the crime. But this is no exploration of Columbine and shouldn't be read as one. What interests Coupland is not so much the event of the shooting itself but rather the results which it produces. A series of seismic circles pulsating outwards until we reach the here and now.

The first two words of the novel tell us what Coupland is really doing here and they are Cheryl's words `I believe'. Coupland sets the shooting in 1988 for a good reason, and that is to distance it, historicize it almost; to use it as a genesis point for his real theme, which is belief in all the multifarious incarnations in which it exists within our society. Each of the four main characters that share the narrative unevenly between them, are shown dealing with a collapse of the system of belief which has maintained them. These systems range from Reg's evangelical fanaticism, through the bitchy, disloyal Youth Alive! Christian group of which Jason and Cheryl are a part; to the more dubious emotional dependence which Heather develops for the utterances of a psychic, when Jason disappears.

Just as the soothsaying's of Nostradamus have helped society to post-rationalise the terrible events which happen on our planet everyday ( most memorably of course in the prophecy of the `two twin brothers torn apart by chaos' which was beamed around the globe by email after September 11th) so too do these characters twist and manipulate religious or pagan beliefs to protect themselves. It is an hypocrisy summed up most aptly by Cheryl when she states `I did want Jason, but, as I've said, only on my own terms, which also happened to be God's terms,...I'm not sure if I used God or he used me."

There are flaws in Coupland's text; the sub-plot in which Jason becomes involved is confusing and adds little to the development of the story, and certainly confuses the ending in a way that is less enigmatic, more frustrating. However, if you can get beyond reading this as a meditation upon Columbine, you will find a great deal of interest and reward in this text, and a realisation that the issues it is addressing are far more pertinant and universal than it could be given credit for.

Coupland has once again produced a strong story, with an element of the surreal creeping in. Whereas "All Families are Psychotic" had a number of surreal strands that rendered the required the reader to suspend their normal perspective, the worrying aspect of "Hey Nostradamus!" is that the principle surreal element is a school shooting that is, in fact, all too plausible. One aspect of the shooting is recounted from a victim's perspective (and from the perspective of immediately after the event), whereas the other story strands are taken from the vantage of several years after the event. The chain reactions from this are elegantly woven together - the husband of the victim who can not come to terms with the event, his relationship to his father and how that develops as a consequence of the tragedy, how his family interacts with his father. As with most of Coupland's later works, this story evolves through the different perspectives, rather than follows a rigid plot and time line.

As either an introduction to those who have not read Coupland before, of for established fans, this is a volume that is well worth reading.

Coupland's latest novel is by far the best of his later books. I have been a devout reader of Douglas Coupland's work and have been disappointed with basically everything since Microserfs. Hey Nostradamus! has changed all of that. Hey! is a critical look into modern fanatacism and the consequences of being a teenager in a world filled with guns, God, and video games.

The novel is divided into four parts each narrated by a different character. The connections between the characters are at first, not obvious. Coupland threads these misfits into a disjointed narrative that works. The first part is narrated by Cheryl, who has been killed in a Columbine-style massacre in a Vancouver high school in 1988. Cheryl's account reminds me of Susie Salmon's in The Lovely Bones--She is telling the story from a "space" not heaven, not hell, not earth. As macabre as the plot is, the style works. Her husband's (Jason's) account is not as seamless, but his disillusionment shows well through the narrative.

I would have liked to have read more about Reg, Jason's religious fanatic father, but his portion of the book was cut short, I felt. There is no obvious resolution here, but in today's world, there seldom is. This, I believe, is Coupland's intent, or part of it, anyway.

For those looking for critical insight into post-Columbine, post-9/11 North America, Douglas Coupland's latest novel does not disappoint.

A thought provoking and interesting book. It is so different from the other novels that are mass produced and over promoted. Some of the phrases that I particularly enjoyed are:

"It always seemed to me that people who'd discovered religion had both lost and gained something. Outwardly, they'd gained calmness, confidence and a look of purpose, but what they'd lost was a certain willingness to connect with unconverted souls."

"My brain feels like a cool, deep lake."

"Through a Starbucks window I'm watching a sunset the color of children's aspirin as I crash-land n two clonazepams."

"The point here is that there are certain human behavioral traits that can be talked about, but unless you've experienced the impulse behind them, they remain theoretical. Most of the time, this is for the best."

"I remember finding out that the world was actually just a planet, in school in the third grade, and I remember hating the teacher, Mr. rowan, who discussed the solar system as if it were a rock collection."

Coupland has a great knack for using language creatively and in a succinctly descriptive way. His characters were interesting, albeit all desperately lonely, and his expression of the tragedy and how it affected them all uniquely was fascinating.

I kind of gave up on Douglas Coupland sometime after Shampoo Planet. He is a talented writer, one whose wit and prose I admire even when I admire the book much less. However, it felt to me as though he often took the easy way out with his work. If his wit had been less ready, his books would have been much stronger.

My partner recommended that I read Hey Nostradamus. He has stayed more hopeful than I about Coupland as a writer and thought that this book was a real change in direction for him-- the first in a very long time.

I agree. While as readable as Coupland generally is, it is much harder-hitting than a book like Girlfriend in a Coma. He (largely) resists the temptation to tell us too much in his trademark monologues and letters. He used a number of sidesteps in the past to elide the hard stuff that comes up in his books, and none of them are evident here. This is a sweet book in the way that all his books are sweet, but he also lets the real sadness through.

I recommend this novel for either Coupland fans or readers new to his work. Although there is some violence and adult situations, it should still be a good book for teenagers.

Columbine. That's the biggest step you can take to understanding this novel. In the same way that Microserfs, Coupland's best in my opinion, was "about" microsoft and the dot.com era, this book is about the killings in columbine, co. More than that, though, it concerns how traumatic events affect the people who surround them.

Doug likes to write in first person, and this book is a good vehicle for that; it concerns the lives of four people: Cheryl; a girl killed in the shootings, her boyfriend Jason, who is the damaged survivor, and Heather, the "new girlfriend"- 20 years later- who still has to live up to the now-a-saintly-martyr Cheryl, and Jason's father Reg, the fractured family's patriarch-of sorts.

This all sounds very depressing. However, if you've read Coupland before, you'll know of his ability to turn these traumas into transcendent, illuminating moments of clarity, which he does in this book better than he has in years, since "Life After God".

Don't read this book for it's "view" of columbine. Instead, read to learn to appreciate the lives of the people around you. Read it to savor the mulchy descriptions of the pacific northwest. Not to fear death but to treasure life. That sounds pretty pithy... Just give it a try.

Douglas Coupland is certainly a Canadian gem. In this book Coupland, through the minds of four main characters, takes the reader on an amazing path through spirituality, human understanding, great loss, and big turning points--all while maintaining his gift of beautifully pointing out obviousness in this world that many of us miss. What I enjoyed most about this book was not only Coupland's wicked sense of humour, but his ability to tell four different views of the same event(s) through four men and women. It is not every day that one comes across a writer who can effectively capture the mind of a male and a female like Coupland has done so effortlessly in "Hey Nostradamus!". I whole-heartedly recommend this book to anyone looking to explore sides of love, loss and understanding on the spiritual and human fronts. It's a fantastic page-turner, too. And I loathe using that term, so I sincerely mean it.

For many Coupland fans, myself included, he's never been able to top "Microserfs," and its characters, humor, emotion, and his overriding philosophy about seeking something better and the realization about what that something better really is.
After the alienating characters of "All Families are Psychotic," where the reader was practically dared to care about any of them, we find Coupland again returning to a basic theme with a handful of characters. Each part of this book looks at the Columbine-like shooting, its aftermath, and the long-range effects on the characters.
The father character is the most problematic, but the final chapter, written from his perspective, is the key to understanding what this book and Coupland's message is all about. The spiritual themes that Coupland has explored in each of his books (especially "Girlfriend in a Coma") is once again brought front and center. The final paragraph of the book and its apochryphal nature make you stop and re-consider the Biblical themes that have been carried through the course of the overall story. Rather than rejecting religion, Coupland once again, appears to be presenting in a modern context, very debates about Christianity, and what its preachings really are about, as opposed to the way many of its detractors---and some of its most-ardent practitioners---understand its message to be.

In Hey Nostrodomus, Coupland gets back to what he did so well in his earlier books, peeling back the layers of familiar people. revealing fears and emotions that we all carry, the little hidden Things that drive us that go unknown to most.
More importantly he spends time creating real charactors rather than fantastic plot twists or impossible set ups. This one gets pretty close to telling about real people. People we never get the full story on, people that we pass by shaking our heads. While he hasn't returned to the greatness of Microserfs or Life After God, he's much more on track than than All Families are Psychotic and Miss Wyoming.

Fiction allows a reader to experience dreadful events. Yet there is a vast gulf between driving by and witnessing the gory aftermath of an accident and being handed an understanding of how truly tragic the accident becomes in the lives of those involved. Coupland succeeds in his tale of a Columbine-style massacre by comparing and contrasting the effects of the events on characters drawn well enough that the reader cares what happens. Unlike many authors, he is not wielding emotional and physical violence without thought--yet be prepared for the violence nonetheless.

Columbine was all about emotional turmoil on a staggering number of levels. Coupland does a stunning job of laying out the ethical and moral landmines inherent in any thoughtful analysis of tragedy. Naturally, any analysis of tragedy ultimately becomes an analysis of religious faith (or the lack thereof) and the limits and power of forgiveness and redemption. Sadly, nothing can be quite so devastating as the misuse of religion to cover one's own deficiencies, to excuse faults or to supposedly gain power over others who may lack the self-control to follow their own path or in some other fashion be susceptible to the misuse of religious belief. Not only is the misuse of belief treated; Coupland offers several thematic threads (though seemingly odd in the case of the psychic) that show the power of faith and belief. Furthermore, there are several characters who do terrible things and then seek forgiveness. This exploration of the limits of redemption and forgiveness will stay with the reader for a very long time.

Very, very deep stuff but not for the immature or unprepared. Coupland invites us to examine our own motives and provides a reminder of how utterly inadequate we are to judge the actions of others. Finally, though we are incapable of adequate judgment--Coupland reminds that we have the duty and obligation to protect ourselves and others from the hurtful effects of the misuse of freedom by others. In other words, a well-aimed rock can prevent much suffering.