Customer Reviews

Senseless

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I picked up Senseless on a Saturday morning, ran some errands, came home and cracked it open, just to read the first couple pages. For the next few hours I white-knuckled my way through this stunningly original, utterly terrifying and yet beautifully written novel. I was reminded of Damage, by Josephine Hart and Ian Mcewan at his finest. The prose is surgical-steel clean, and just as sharp. Yet it is not the sheer suspense or unfathomable evil that makes this book so powerful, but rather the humanity and vulnerability of the central character who is so realistically drawn that I felt I knew him. Senseless is astonishing.

Not to focus too much on the Book Description (see above), but to call this novel "Orwellian" misses the point, I think. Certainly a publisher can't be blamed for trying to characterize its books in accessible terms. But having read the bound galleys of "Senseless," I can say that it's far removed from Orwell on at least a couple of counts--and all the more astounding for that.

First of all, the universe that protagonist Eliott Gast inhabits is no totalitarian superstate, but rather a recognizable--if extreme--version of our own world. Granted, Gast finds himself in horrifying circumstances that have some of the schematic feel of, say, "1984." But in the novel's apparent focus on global capitalism and the latter-day culture of "reality-based" entertainment and instantaneous information-transfer, Stona Fitch addresses a thoroughly contemporary set of concerns that even Orwell didn't quite anticipate.

And in any case, "Senseless" is not "about" these subjects, exactly--or at least not in the way in which "1984" and "Animal Farm" were most definitely about the nightmares of 20th-Century totalitarianism. In the face of his intractably painful, terrifying, and ultimately numbing predicament, Eliott Gast finds himself slipping further and further into a sort of meditative reflection on his past--and particularly on the joys and deceptions of his sense-saturated life before captivity. Rather than offer a simple cautionary tale on the Orwellian mold, Fitch would have his audience consider the personal foundations of a globalized reality: this seemingly universal society that is in fact based on the interconnectedness of billions of individual appetites, in which the individual is as vulerable to the appetites of others as he is responsible for his own.

To say that "Senseless" is both hard to read and hard to stop reading is the highest compliment I can offer it, and one it richly deserves. As with the most compelling "reality show" yet unimagined, you want to know what will happen next--even as you suspect that the answer will horrify. But if the action is at times wince-making, the writing never is: Great writing never is, and that's what the author offers here. Great writing, in a great, unforgettable, and singular work of art.

Senseless is a riveting, one-sitting novel that takes an unsparing look at the escalating role of sensationalism in todays global culture. Although I read the novel before the World Trade Center tragedy, I am more convinced than ever that this tightly-written study of terrorism is relevant and even instructive. Its tough view of the motivation and execution of a horrifying crime might have seemed exaggerated last year; today it feels ominously possible.
Without giving anything away, Id like to add that the power and hope of the book come into a thrilling focus on the final page. First lines in literature are plentiful, but its a rare book that closes as effectively as Senseless. The final sentences fire your mind and urge you to rethink the entire novel.

This literary novel engages the mind as it assaults the senses. It leads the reader to a political situation that has become far too real, and uses a clever plot and chilling details to push us from a comfortable, open-minded perspective, into a world filled with pain and extremes. While the superficial resistance one might have in reading this book would be an aversion to the descriptions of physical pain, what is far more difficult to accept is the powerful social commentary which deepens this book, as it commands us to explore our own psychology and the contradictions with which we live.

A brilliant portrayal of how a fanatics mind might work. A mind-numbing story of what it might truly feel like to lose your freedom in the blink of an eye.
As a short novel this book suceeds on every level and leaves the reader wishing for more.

I found "Senseless" to be utterly riveting. I was drawn into a bizzarre world of psychological gamemanship as soon as I picked up the book and never looked back. It's a wild ride, and makes you question many of the underlying assumptions about guilt and innocence that we take for granted. As soon as you realize the powerlessness of the narator in his situation, you become one with him, waiting to find out what will happen next, and what he did to deserve his fate.

The writing is taut and economical, and the story moves briskly. One of the most compelling novels I have read in years.

Great book. Explores many unique angles on Terrorism that most would not consider. Excellent plot that makes you not want to put it down. The author, Stona Fitch has a great writing syle that really makes you picture yourself in the situation of the Main Character. A must read.

Years before hopelessly outgunned militants battling the world's last superpower fought back with mpegs of beheadings, the online horrors of captivity and torture were detailed by Stona Fitch in the novel Senseless. Fitch's prescient book captures the asymmetrical warfare of the Information Age in the grueling narration of Eliot Gast, an American economist abducted abroad and terrorized by an anti-globalization sect seeking international attention through his suffering. Beyond the trappings of our era, Senseless succeeds as a struggle of a rational mind against irrational circumstances that recalls Poe's best work, and as a taut thriller that is as unrelenting for the reader as for Gast himself. The violence is, as others have noted, positively horrific, yet still familiar and even compelling, because this scenario is just too plausible. Indeed, as Fitch predicted, it's impossible to escape.

I bought this novel because the author had played in a band I once listened to. But I read it in one day, practically in one sitting, for reasons that had nothing to do with such curiosities.
The novel is horrifying. But to use that word is to do an injustice to its moral ambiguities: it's like thinking that horrors can only exist somewhere else, or at the scene of a really unusual crime. While keeping the action focused on a small apartment in Belgium, Fitch spreads the vision and the implications of his story in two opposite directions. Politically he reveals more and more of the broad vision, the international game that this group is playing with Elliot Gast. Their conspiracy keeps looking bigger - the whole world is involved. And as he spreads out widely in the present world Fitch digs deep into Gast's past, not in cruelty or rushing to judgment but with the fortitude that any morally complex situation requires.
At each step there is more than enough blame to go around, certainly enough blame to make the reader wonder what kind of redemption there can be. And as I read the book Fitch's answer is: "Well, a little." In those terms the final scene is an astonishment. It resolves the story of Gast's imprisonment, but with a new queasy moral ambiguity to go with the resolution.
Is this a "political" book? It is morally meditative in ways that political novels often are not. It might even make you think of another novel in which featureless white objects come to be loaded with meaning after meaning; in which a man resembling a pirate tries to take out revenge on the whole world; in which a lonely consciousness winds up containing terrors it can't even decipher. I'm not saying that Senseless reads like Moby-Dick or will necessarily remind you of Moby-Dick. I am saying that Stona Fitch writes in Melville's tradition of looking for something you'd call goodness in the world and wondering where to find it.

I saw somebody reading this book on MUNI (That's public transportation for those of you unfortunate enough not to live in S.F.) and asked how it was and he told me it was "Great!" I asked what it was about and he told me it was about terrorism and politics and current affairs and the internet. And it sounded interesting, so I picked up a copy and WOW. Well, it IS about what that man said, but to me it's MUCH more of a story about one man's survival -alone with himself and his ghastly captors, and how he lives with the mind games and the terror. It was a very quick read, but not a "beach book" quick read, it's literary. And by that I mean it has beautiful prose and it's just very graceful. I really enjoyed it, but I wouldn't say it's such a political or current events book -although again, it is- but rather a study of one man, surviving. Some readers may not like the violence, but it really was essential to the story. I will read this author's next book!