Customer Reviews

Special Topics in Calamity Physics

5 star:		(115)
4 star:		(75)
3 star:		(59)
2 star:		(40)
1 star:		(40)

 

 

Part of me is tempted to give "Special Topics in Calamity Physics" 3 stars, but that would give the impression that I found it mediocre and passionless. On the contrary, part of me loved the book to 5 stars, but the excessive loquatiousness of the narrator's expression nearly drove me to distraction. So my mathematical reducion will stay at 4 stars, with reservations explained. By Chapter 8 I was still not engaged enough to convince me that I was going to actually read the whole book. But by the end I stayed awake reading as late as I could one night, and stole away enough time the next day to finish it. Reading this story was like running a reverse marathon that started out as a meandering stroll and ended in a sprint.

And when I say marathon, I mean marathon. Most reviewers have noted the length of the book, weighing in at over 500 pages. Individual sentences stretched on and on with strange metaphors, literary allusions and references, and parenthetical comments galore. Much of it was dense academic blathering--in character, to be sure, but still very annoying to read. Oftentimes I'd find myself strugging with a long sentence, breathlessly awaiting a period like a drowing person begging for someone to throw her a life preserver. If you can get through this style of writing, there is a compelling story waiting to be decoded, but this book won't be for everyone. Though I felt like I was cheating a bit, after the first half of the story I gave myself permission to give up on close textual analysis and read like a skipping stone. The author's pacing picked up in the later stages of the book as well, but as a reader I did make a conscious choice to step in as an editor.

If you still think you'd enjoy the book, I'd say stop reading the reviews and just go read it. I'll say a few more things without being too spoiler-ish. After reading narrator Blue's interpretation of events, I am dying to talk to other people who have read the book to find out what they think really happened. Blue unleashes a torrent of thoughts on her readers, but they are the analyses of an incredibly erudite 16-year-old who lived within the heart of a very tangled web. In other words, what is left unsaid in the story is almost as compelling as the picture that Blue assembles as her own understanding. Blue is an unreliable narrator, not in the sense that she is trying to deceive the reader, but rather that there is only so much truth she can piece together and face. The true brilliance of Marisha Pessl's writing is that she provides enough information to allow the reader to come to some very different conclusions than Blue, based on Blue's first-person narrative.

Maddeningly, though, I came looking for a story, and I don't have time to immerse myself in solving a dense puzzle. Pessl ends the book with a "Final Exam" that stands in for the last chapter. It was a choice hailed by many critics, but it left me feeling hollow and put out. The "testing" of the reader occurs throughout the book, in ways amusing and annoying. Recurring words and images (variations of the word "oily" and references to coins and stillettos) felt clunky, rather than enlightening. Pessl has created a website for the book that would most likely yield additional clues if one would search diligently for the secrets. But much as I love the TV show "Lost," but have no interest in the ongoing "Lost Experience" on the web, I am resigned to accepting that I may never unravel the knot that still lies at the heart of "Special Topics in Calamity Physics." Writing a master's thesis on Nabokov would be a good place to start, but I think we'd all agree that's asking a great deal of one's readers.

After reading several reviews of Special Topics in Calamity physics, I was hesitant to read the book, but I am very glad that I did. Although the other reviews are correct in saying that the beginning is rather slow, the book gains speed right around page 170. However, the information provided to you in these first 170 pages ends up being rather important by the end of the story. There are a lot of little things, mostly small bits of information about Hannah, but other things as well, that end up coming into play much later in to book, somewhere around page 400. I agree that parts of the text could have been cut out, but I fail to comprehend why one would want to do so. Marisha Pessl's writing technique kept me entertained throughout the 170 pages of seemingly useless information. I found myself captivated by her use of both citations and wonderfully detailed descriptions. Also, Pessl's twists in the story are far beyond what I expected. They kept me on the edge of my seat throughout the book. I was especially interested in Nigel, although I am not sure why. I don't identify with his character per se, but I wish she had developed his, and all of the Bluebloods characters a bit more. The only thing about this book that I didn't like was the lack of an ending. I understand that that was somewhat the point, to leave it open for interpretation. It was even mentioned earlier in the book how much Gareth Van Meer hated absolute endings because it left nothing up to the imagination. So although I think that this is a fitting ending, I, being one of the "Americans" that he speaks of, wish that the ending had been at least a bit more definite. All in all, I think that Special Topics in Calamity Physics is a very well written book. It is not, however, a "quick read" (Although it may be considered one for Blue.)

It is clear that twenty-something Marisha Pessl has talent, judging from the reviews already garnered for her debut novel, SPECIAL TOPICS IN CALAMITY PHYSICS. It is also a given that many will automatically compare SPECIAL TOPICS --- or, as I like to call it, "The Book That Is Bound To Wind Up On Many End-Of-The-Year-Bests Lists" --- to Donna Tartt's THE SECRET HISTORY. What hasn't been decided is whether or not readers will trudge through the 300 or so "set-up pages" in order to get to the truly exhilarating final 200.

From the get-go, SPECIAL TOPICS might seem a bit off-putting to some. Its plot unfolds, for the most part, on yet another wealthy high school campus, narrated by a protagonist (who some will swear bares a striking resemblance to Pessl) who is quite precocious and full of Big Ideas that are exhaustingly annotated, often with references to various books in parentheses --- a cumulative bibliography of sorts. Each chapter, although plot-driven, is tied to a certain curricular theme --- mainly, a well-known and often revered work of literary mastery (OTHELLO, HEART OF DARKNESS, THE TRIAL, PARADISE LOST, etc.). There is an Introduction, of course, as well as a cleverly designed afterword (aptly titled "Final Exam") that consists of questions readers might enjoy noodling over after finishing the actual story. All in all, it's a kitschy package for the publisher and booksellers, and a clever ploy to attract potential readers who may or may not be into the gimmick.

To give a brief synopsis of the book without giving anything away, SPECIAL TOPICS follows 16-year-old Blue van Meer and her father (a distinguished college professor) as they flit around the country, living in various college towns, mostly for one year at a time. Most of the book's meat takes place during Blue's senior year of high school at St. Gallway, a prep school in a small North Carolina mountain town called Stockton. To her surprise, Blue is soon befriended by the Bluebloods, an exclusive group of co-eds led by a film teacher (yes, a teacher), Hannah Schneider. For much of the book's beginning, the action (or lack thereof) revolves around Blue's interactions with various members of the Bluebloods, while she attempts to adjust to her new environment, maintain her valedictorian status, and continue on in her close but motherless relationship with her father. Thus far, the story is fairly status quo and reads as such.

A little more than halfway through the book, however, SPECIAL TOPICS takes a turn for the better and becomes infinitely more interesting. After a number of other minor yet noteworthy calamities, the Bluebloods go on a camping trip in the Great Smoky Mountains and Hannah Schneider winds up dead, dangling from a tree. (Not to worry, this detail is mentioned in the Introduction.) What follows is an adrenalin-driven thrill ride that is so clever and so delightfully complicated that readers will surely be kept on the edge of their seats until the very end. And the best part is that the whodunit is never fully solved --- or is it?

The question still remains: Does the gruesome conspiracy theory mystery disguised as an erudite treatise on teenage angst and literary greatness gimmick work?

Pessl's heavily weighted academic and artistic background (she studied English and Creative Writing at Columbia, and has dabbled in acting and the fine arts) is clearly present on every page of the book. Her incessant attention to detail, thematic chapter headings, and aforementioned literary side notes are often accompanied by art class line drawings as well. The effect of this combination lands somewhere between the tantalizing and the absurd. Sure, it's helpful to have a bit of defining background, but sometimes the onslaught approach (especially when reading a juicy murder mystery) feels like overkill and a little unnecessary.

Yet, despite it all, many readers will still slog through the minutiae to find themselves fully captivated by Pessl's scintillating world of intrigue. Her pacing toward the end of the story is spot-on, and her talent for playing up the suspense without ever fully giving in to it is brilliant. She excels at writing for shock value and never underestimates the intelligence (and imagination) of her readers. After reading the "Final Exam," some more dedicated readers might even feel the impulse to read through various sections of the book again in order to fit the pieces of this fascinating puzzle together.

--- Reviewed by Alexis Burling

I wanted to love this book. The slobbering reviews made me salivate, too. As an English major/philosophy minor, I was intrigued by the clever-sounding premise and could not wait to spend the next few days reading the next great American novel.

The premise is clever in theory; in practice, it's pretentious. The parenthetical references make reading this novel feel like jogging through a tar pit. The worst thing, however, is the clunky writing, which consists of at least 10000 similes, metaphors and descriptions that grated on my brain. If you think "a nervous, empty canteen" and "backpacks...lined up like old men" are the height of clever, then you may enjoy this book and its 99,998 other descriptive phrases and similes. I would mention more of them for your amusement but I could not get rid of this book fast enough.

I feel like such an idiot for believing that gushing New York Times review of this overhyped, overwritten, exhausting bunch of words words words, a mudflow of words without a serious point in sight. I honestly think people love this book because they've read somewhere that they're supposed to love this book, and who can disagree with Jonathan Franzen? For the record, I could care less what the author's jacket photo looks like. She pours out every single bite of knowledge she's ever known or learned into every single paragraph, alongside characters you cannot stand to be around and who never appear genuine or real in any way. The 'plot' for lack of a better word (Marisha, help me here -- I need six or seven alternatives) is laughable. The overabundant froth made me want to poke out my eyes with a stick. Verbosity does not equal virtuosity, I don't care what the Times critics say (and that goes for Zadie Smith, Jonathan Safran Foer and Susanna Clarke, among other young run-at-the mouth authors-in-the-making the Times has frothed over in the past). But it's my fault for having believed them, and for having spent my hard earned money on the hardbacks! Shame on me!

For all the positive page-play this novel has gotten in book reviews, I'm frankly embarassed for the author, who clearly has ambition but stands in the literary spotlight denuded of any real talent. Stylistically it mirrors much of its setting: after the 50th overstretched simile you feel like you're droning along through the bleak, snoozy highway stretches of middle America that serve as Dad-n-Daughter's domestic domain (Pessl, 2006, Exercises in Excessive, Extemporaneous Alliteration). The annotation concept, which could have been a brilliant tool (see Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire, 1962), turns out to be as insipid and heavy as all the third-rate citizens of the book that Blue takes every opportunity to dismiss with endless, uninsightful criticism. After a few chapters of her tedious (and except for a few funny examples, wholly dull) asides, you start to feel like you're trapped in a corner with a storyteller who endlessly tacks on irrelevant details and tangents just to hear more of her own voice. If the book's biggest crime is that it's Boring, BORING, the great injustice to its readers is that it's utterly hollow and overblown (Eggshell Christmas Ornaments, The Kitchen Craft Guide Vol 3, Issue 1, 1999). The overall voice is gimmicky and juvenile, and I guess it should be the latter, given the age of the narrator, but Pessl failed to endow Blue with any of the epic depth and/or complex combination of youthful innocence/cunning that characterizes great, young, female protagonists (see Scarlett in Gone with the Wind, Mitchell, 1936 and Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee, 1962). Instead, Blue's stuck in a shallow, sticky, pimpled regime of self-righteousness of the very sort Gareth would attack in his un-funny, tries-way-too-hard-to-be-profound-and-charming way. Like wooden Gareth, pretty much every character is a hasty patchwork of physical characteristics and told-but-not-shown veneers of inner character (Fabulous Facades: Creative Window Treatments, 2001). After spending 500+ pages with Blue, there aren't any words I would use in her epitaph except for tedious & shallow. That's too bad, given the narrative territory Pessl set out to cover (The Blunders of Wunderauthors, 2006).

Review of: "Special Topics in Calamity Physics"

By Marisha Pessl

This is a murder mystery. We learn of the mysterious death of one of the main characters early in the book. The death might have been a murder or might have been suicide. As the story develops, we learn that the victim is one of a cast of extraordinary characters. We know from the start of the death. When it happens, the sequence of events is still surprising.

The main character is a precocious teen girl named Blue van Meer. She has extraordinary talents, exceptional perception and is a dynamic central character. The reader quickly builds up sympathy and concern for her welfare.

The gradual introduction of revolutionary cabals, conspiracies, hidden societies and secret identities keep the readers attention up to the astonishing ending. Other reviewers noted the overuse of illusion and metaphor. I felt that the literary illusions added to the story. Both Blue van Meer and her father, Gareth van Meer, are academics in a closed circle of literati. Their frequent references to literary scenes and characters, both real and fabricated, felt very natural in this setting. Even the fabricated literary references add to the tale.

Note that there is an interesting web site for "Special Topics in Calamity Physics." The web address is:

http://www.CalamityPhysics.com/main.htm

I liked this book very much and I recommend it to others.

I suspect this is one of those books that many people will like but I don't; same experience with other idiosyncratic novels such as Confedarcy of Dunces, with which this book shares the claustrophobic-making central character. The voice of the narrator certainly is consistent--no noun goes unmodified, no concept goes unexplained, no scene lacks in detail (e.g., I'm sure the narrator wouldn't eat 'a hotdog' but 'a Kahns premium twelve inch hotdog with a whole wheat bun, Heinz Ketchup, yellow mustard with just a smidgen of that relish that you buy on the third shelf of the Krogers with the vibrant green sheen and well blended texture.") Drives me crazy. But others must like it I'm sure. Plot? Yep, it must be in there somewhere, and I bet it's a good one too. Guess the bottom line: what the author does, she does well--I just don't have an appreciation for it. Think I'll read some Hemingway next to counteract the verbiage.

Review of: "Special Topics in Calamity Physics"

By Marisha Pessl

This is a murder mystery. We learn of the mysterious death of one of the main characters early in the book. The death might have been a murder or might have been suicide. As the story develops, we learn that the victim is one of a cast of extraordinary characters. We know from the start of the death. When it happens, the sequence of events is still surprising.

The main character is a precocious teen girl named Blue van Meer. She has extraordinary talents, exceptional perception and is a dynamic central character. The reader quickly builds up sympathy and concern for her welfare.

The gradual introduction of revolutionary cabals, conspiracies, hidden societies and secret identities keep the readers attention up to the astonishing ending. Other reviewers noted the overuse of illusion and metaphor. I felt that the literary illusions added to the story. Both Blue van Meer and her father, Gareth van Meer, are academics in a closed circle of literati. Their frequent references to literary scenes and characters, both real and fabricated, felt very natural in this setting. Even the fabricated literary references add to the tale.

I liked this book very much and I recommend it to others.

This book was one I Did Not Enjoy. Mainly because it had all the Staples of Teen Chick Lit, not to mention a Habit of Capitalizing Words to make the Writing Sound Important. Such as:

1. The heroine must be Smarter than Everyone and endlessly remind the reader of this.
2. The heroine must get a Makeover in order to be accepted into the Cool Clique; in her pre-makeover stage, she's a Hopeless Dork.
3. The Cool Clique turns out to have Shady Secrets, not to mention a too-cute little name (Bluebloods).
4. The heroine must be a Self-Righteous Little Twit, not to mention Compulsively Judgmental.
5. Everyone must have a soap opera name. (I always picture the author ingesting Recreational Substances while trying to figure out ultra Kreative Monikers, that Have Never Before been Used in Literature.)
6. Characters are described in detail only to never be heard from again.
7. The heroine must embarass herself in front of the Studly Hero, usually by doing the Technicolor Yawn in public, a.l.a. Lindsay Lohan in "Mean Girls."
8. The heroine must be someone you would long to stab if you had to sit next to her on a plane for longer than an hour.
9. There must be an Abundance of Bad, not to mention Mixed Metaphors.
10. All the critics must Adore said Book and grace it with adjectives such as "Cutting Edge" and "Ambitious."

Well, if you like pretentious chick lit, give this a try. It just wasn't To My Tastes In the Slightest.