Customer Reviews

Regarding Roderer

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

 

 

Gustavo Roderer sacrifices all to enter a new realm where all current forms of logic and philosophy are null and void. An unseen force acts against his efforts to shed all of humankind's "learned" approach to solving the most basic of questions.

Roderer forsakes a formal education and sheds family, friends and the girl who loves him to pursue a knowledge only God and the Devil share. As he gets closer to the truth, he becomes less able to articulate his thoughts to his closest and only friend. Consumed by disease, he discovers the answer.

Martinez tells a wonderful story of two young men in Argentina--both geniuses. One pursues answers to questions unconcievable, while the other builds himself a normal life within the context of all human knowledge. They feed of each others pursuits, triumphs and failures. Roderer races as fast as he can to find the answers in what little time--he is sure--is left. His friend, the narrator, pulls himself away from his family, his small home town and Roderer over a long period of time.

Neither can reach the end of their journey without the other.

Martinez uses a brilliant mix of mathematics and philosophy to fuel the exchanges between the narrator and Roderer.

This intense novel is the history of the friendship between two gifted boys. One of them, the narrator, has always been the brightest in his class. He orients himself wide and takes knowledge from the world surrounding him. The other, Gustavo Roderer, is the new boy in class that fascinates and frightens with another type of intelligence: more extreme and sweeping, more introspective og mystical. Roderer balances on the hazy line between lunacy and wisdom. He seeks the root of the knowledge, moving in the icy landscapes of thoughts stilbb burning with fire. The narrator tries to incorporate more pragmatic sense into his new friend and the narrator's sister gives her love to Roderer, but he is already lost. It's true that you see the tragic end of the book almost from the start but it's not because of a fatalistic presence in the novel more because of the narrators reciting voice through it all that doesn't need to hide anything from the reader. It is a hard, sharp and precise vocabulary that reminded me more of contemporary electronic music that is clean and machinelike, observing cynically the processes that takes place before ones eyes. The book also draws comparisons to Mann's "Dr. Faustus" with its main protagonist beyond help from others, lost in the fervent search for something higher. ***(*) on the barometer

Charming and intelligent story. This kind of writing remembers me the precision of a Swiss clock, where the end tells 12 o'clock.

A brief novel by Guillermo Martinez. The early 1980s. The narrator (clearly an alter ego of Martinez, who also went on to study mathematics) is a teenager living in a small seaside town in the south of Buenos Aires province. He regards himself as the brightest person in town. One day, a new kid named Gustavo Roderer arrives in town, and the first time they met, Roderer beats him in chess. Then they meet in school, and the narrator increasingly becomes fascinated by Roderer, whom he sees as a sort of genius of otherworldly intelligence who has read everything. However, as time passes, and as the narrator goes to college to study math while Roderer stays at home, the reader slowly realizes that Roderer is hardly a genius, he's just a cultural omnivore, someone who has read a lot, but who lives holed up in a room in her mother's house, under increasingly difficult circumstances, dreaming in vain of creating a new system of philosophy that would overthrow the prevalent one. A good debut by Martinez, a writer working unusual themes.

Gustav Roderer is an unconventional genuis. His understanding of mathematics transcends the conscious realm as he drops out and pursues an elusive deeper understanding of it all.

This is the story of two young geniuses - Roderer and the Narrator - from Argentina who, despite their differences, become friends and confidants. While the Narrator follows a normal course in pursuit of more kwoledge, the other falls deeper into a world only he understands. Roderer knows that humankind's efforts to date fall short of what it will take to reach the next step in the evolution of our understanding and he is within reach of a new level to our consciousness.

As he is ravaged by disease he tries to share what he is beginning to grasp with his friend the Narrator before the end that he knows is near comes.

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A Guide to my Rating System:

1 star = The wood pulp would have been better utilized as toilet paper.
2 stars = Don't bother, clean your bathroom instead.
3 stars = Wasn't a waste of time, but it was time wasted.
4 stars = Good book, but not life altering.
5 stars = This book changed my world in at least some small way.