Customer Reviews

Pfitz: A Novel

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

 

 

Andrew Crumey is a young Scottish novelist more interested in inheriting the mantel of Barthelme, Borges and Calvino than the arid workaday mentality of most British and American novelists.

This novel bristles with ideas, the inhabitants of a kingdom set to work populating a fictitious city. The work on the city is based on a model from Diderot and Dalambert's Encyclopaedia and is divided into Memory, Reason, and Imagination.

There are interlinking storylines and the novel is part love story, part thriller, part comedy, part philosophical investigation.

As you can see from the other reviews this novel will polarise opinion. This is a novel that requires you to think. The reader has to play a role in the story. You can not let this novel wash over you, although its length and the beauty of the writing style give you a novel that can be eaten quickly, but you should digest at leisure. To say that this novel encourages you to think may give a misleading impression. It is not an arid dry purely philosophical work.

This novel, indeed all of Crumey's fiction, bears comparison with writers such as Borges, Calvino, Tadeusz Konwicki, and Galli. It is as playful as the works of each of these writers, as stimulating, and as enjoyable.

It is a work in the modern European style, and harks back to the European novel writing of the eighteenth century.

Enjoy...

I work in a bookstore and I was lucky enough to get an advanced copy of this book to read. This book was an amazing look at the construction of a fictional city with inhabitants and maps, etc. All the people in a real life kingdom have been chraged by their prince to create the city of Rreinstadt. The kingdom is divided up into departments. Certain people are in charge of creating the people (the Biography department), the city (the Cartography department), and the writing created if any of the "inhabitants" turn out to be writers (the Authorship department). The book centers around a "person" who suddenly appears on a map, but the Biography department has no record of him. As a cartographer starts to look deeper into this unknown creation, he starts to realize that someone in the real world doesn't want him finding out the truth. This amazingly intricate and compelling book was a joy to read

This book cleverly captures the spirit of the 18th century while being very modern in concept. In part it's an update of Jacques The Fatalist by Denis Diderot, which I read for a French Lit course. Like Diderot's book, Pfitz is about a master and servant, full of philosophy and erudite humour. But Crumey's book is no pastiche - he subverts Diderot's idea, adding hints of ETA Hoffman, Goethe and heaven knows what else. An amazing achievement to pack so much into a short and ver funny book. Borgesian? This is nothing like him. It's a highly original book and recommended reading for people who like to have their imagination stretched a little - actually, quite a bit.

I don't know, I really liked this book for a while. It presented some fantastically challenging ideas and concepts. The thought of an entire group of people living for an imaginary world, the disintegration of the town as a result, the characters merging real and definitely not real...all of it was very intriguing.

But this book lost me at the end, which I really felt was a let-down. It was as if Crumey's ideas were even too much for him...the ending simply dissolves away, solving little and not truly melding the two realities together. As an author, what can you really do with characters who decide that composing non-existent places is more important than their actual lives? How much can a reader really sympathize with a man who falls in love with a woman, when neither of them have any emotions at all concerning the absurd nature of their lives? And, the absurdity is never really treated as "absurdity" because of consistency problems. Certain characters even point out that the other world isn't real but it's never followed up.

Near the end of _Pfitz_, I found myself wondering why the characters were struggling at all if they really only cared about the imaginary world. Why try to find love? Why kill? Why steal? Why worry about rent? Why do anything except work on the other world? If the true fascination of the book sits within this kingdom's fascination with things that are completely invented, why should we be interested in the -real- things that happen to them. Once I reached this thought, the book was no longer compelling. I just didn't see the point, and reading to the end gave me no reason to change my mind. Crumey never really answers these questions.

Sure, the book is an easy read. It's very short and sweet. But it's a little jerky at times, abrupt in presenting ideas and concepts. Good premise, good idea in theory, even witty storytelling at times, but the work as a whole has some serious flaws. And the ending just doesn't deliver.

What a joy to read a book that's truly unusual in concept. The author blurs the lines between reality and fiction until the reader forgets where the lines were drawn. Fascinating, interesting, and fun.

The other reviews sum it up: Pfitz is a book you either love or you hate. A novel as original and imaginative as this will not appeal to those with, let us say, more mainstream tastes. But if you like Flann O'Brien, Kafka or Poe then give it a try.

I do not like labels, especially labels like 'post modern'. A good work of fiction survives without labels, maybe even in spite of labels. This is not a book which follows traditional patterns, characters, events, relationships, beginnings-middles-ends. Maps and cities and people are drawn, built and destroyed, and not necessarily in that order. You read it and you get a sense of wonder, a feeling that somehow, by having read this book, you are a little different, that you are not you, the you that you thought you were. and it is great to feel that way. I know that there will not be rhinoceri or the peddler of the colonel's photographs (Ionesco)in Andrew Crumey's cities or novels, but I will observe them peeking around corners anyway.

While interesting at times and generally good, it's too formulaically Borgesian and ultimately deals with the whole creator theme with too little subtlety.

I have read the reviews of Pfitz, but sincerely disagree as it being proclaimed cerebral. While the concept is ok, Crumley eventually loses credibility as a writer with silly 'thought provoking' issues that only Dan Quayle would find fascinating. He tries to throw in too many concepts, and the reader simply loses interest. He even insults literature and authors. I finished the book, and afterward I was longing to read a Jackie Collins novel. I enjoy a rich novel bred from intelligence, but Andrew Crumley's Pfitz was as boring as dirty dish water. If there had been a choice of an 1/8 star, that's what I would've rated this annoying 'book'. I think I found four pages interesting. I will now write something as silly as Pfitz--this book will leave you in fits, and should only be read if one enjoys being annoyed.

'Pfitz' amounts to no more than Italo Calvino fan fiction. While Crumey sets up a potentially fresh work of postmodernist fantasy, he handles it with the clumsiness of a precocious 14-year-old.

Read Diderot's 'Jacques The Fatalist' and Calvino's 'Invisible Cities,' and ignore this useless combination of the two.