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A Naked Singularity (Paper) - Sergio de la Pava
A Naked Singularity (Paper)
by: (author)
4.50 30
A Naked Singularity tells the story of Casi, a child of Colombian immigrants who lives in Brooklyn and works in Manhattan as a public defender--one who, tellingly has never lost a trial. Never. In the book, we watch what happens when his sense of justice and even his sense of self begin to... show more
A Naked Singularity tells the story of Casi, a child of Colombian immigrants who lives in Brooklyn and works in Manhattan as a public defender--one who, tellingly has never lost a trial. Never. In the book, we watch what happens when his sense of justice and even his sense of self begin to crack--and how his world then slowly devolves. It’s a huge, ambitious novel clearly in the vein of DeLillo, Foster Wallace, Pynchon, and even Melville, and it's told in a distinct, frequently hilarious voice, with a striking human empathy at its center. Its panoramic reach takes readers through crime and courts, immigrant families and urban blight, media savagery and media satire, scatology and boxing, and even a breathless heist worthy of any crime novel. If Infinite Jest stuck a pin in the map of mid-90s culture and drew our trajectory from there, A Naked Singularity does the same for the feeling of surfeit, brokenness, and exhaustion that permeates our civic and cultural life today. In the opening sentence of William Gaddis’s A Frolic of His Own, a character sneers, "Justice? You get justice in the next world. In this world, you get the law." A Naked Singularity reveals the extent of that gap, and lands firmly on the side of those who are forever getting the law.
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Format: Paper
ISBN: 9780226141794 (0226141799)
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Pages no: 678
Edition language: English
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Community Reviews
Reading Adler's List
Reading Adler's List rated it
4.0
Much like the title suggests, themes collapse in on themselves in De La Pava’s self-published 700 page novel. It revels in digressions and ambiguity. Maybe a little too self-consciously at times and there’s definitely some obscurantism going on. What was left unanswered for me at the end was wh...
Infinite Satellite
Infinite Satellite rated it
4.0
*Check out http://www.infinitereads.com for other reviews and sundry thoughts!* The real-life Cinderella story of how A Naked Singularity achieved publication is itself the stuff of great fiction. Sergio de la Pava originally self-published his heavyweight novel in 2008. Rather than land silently on...
JeffreyParis
JeffreyParis rated it
See my review at Infinite Tasks of Philosophy.Like a number of others who were internettedly active during Infinite Summer, I received a copy of a self-published novel along with a very nice, personalized note, referring not only to my work on IJ but also my philosophical writings on imprisonment an...
cjc
cjc rated it
5.0 A Naked Singularity (Paper)
I just don't know what to say about this book. I think maybe it is truly great. I don't think I can review it any more than I could review Moby Dick or Madame Bovary (or perhaps more appropriately, Wittgenstein's Mistress; or maybe Terra Nostra or other similarly big, messy, ambitious works). Anythi...
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