Customer Reviews

The Musical Illusionist: and Other Tales (Hotel St. George)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

A gift from a friend for my birthday, I was thrilled as I flipped through the book and read its back cover. It looked like a fascinating romp through Possibility.

In short, the scholarship in the book is not scholarly enough -- as a well-read scientist I felt like the author wasn't reaching at all. He was pulling recently popularized science off the shelf, explaining it poorly and then trying to improvise on it. Only, neither was the creativity in the book creative enough. I felt like the author was constantly impressed with his own cleverness, but with only a couple exceptions there was nothing exceptional about the ideas. They were merely wrong -- not nearly inventive enough to justify the book.

Compare this work to Borges' or Calvino's -- both boldly mentioned on the back -- and its too shoddy to be placed on the same shelf.

The book's construction, layout, and ambitious use of color were all tantalizing, but none of that is sufficient to make up for poor ideas in a book about great ideas.

In brief, the book is pretty -- but also pretty expensive -- and you should read the people mentioned on the the book's back rather the author whose name is emblazoned on its front.
Instead of this, look to:
Borges: Collected Fictions or Cosmicomics. Please.

What is The Musical Illusionist? The book itself barely resembles traditional adult fiction texts. It is interspersed with lush full-color plates bearing lively images of artwork, and photographs of relics; several pages contain mathematic graphs, musical staves, or paradigms for linguistic conjugations. Its format is part-textbook, part-tour brochure--it resembles the glossy-paged minitexts on history and culture and customs which tourists skim before traveling for the first time to a foreign nation. The latter resemblance is certainly not coincidental. Illusionist is set up as a sort of companion text that is to be read during the reader's subway ride through a secret night gallery called "The Library of Tangents." "It's said...that unlike a conventional library, it is an archive not of history, but of possibility. You've heard it described as a vast catalogue of deviations--improbable histories, oblique paths, scientific anomalies" (8-9). While admittedly intriguing, none of this, however, necessarily implies that one will ever encounter a traditional story, and it prompts questions as to whether or not fiction is more than just the creation of inert phantasms. But Illusionist, if pursued, actually contains two texts which (arguably) qualify as stories. And it is the first of the pair, "Book of Glass," which allows readers to begin an understanding of the nature of The Musical Illusionist as a whole.