Blueprints of the Afterlife
by:
Ryan Boudinot (author)
From the wickedly talented” (Boston Globe) and darkly funny” (New York Times Book Review) Ryan Boudinot, Blueprints of the Afterlife is a tour de force.It is the Afterlife. The end of the world is a distant, distorted memory called the Age of F***ed Up Shit.” A sentient glacier has wiped out...
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From the wickedly talented” (Boston Globe) and darkly funny” (New York Times Book Review) Ryan Boudinot, Blueprints of the Afterlife is a tour de force.It is the Afterlife. The end of the world is a distant, distorted memory called the Age of F***ed Up Shit.” A sentient glacier has wiped out most of North America. Medical care is supplied by open-source nanotechnology, and human nervous systems can be hacked.Abby Fogg is a film archivist with a niggling feeling that her life is not really her own. She may be right. Al Skinner is a former mercenary for the Boeing Army, who’s been dragging his war baggage behind him for nearly a century. Woo-jin Kan is a virtuoso dishwasher with the Hotel and Restaurant Management Olympics medals to prove it. Over them all hovers a mysterious man named Dirk Bickle, who sends all these characters to a full-scale replica of Manhattan under construction in Puget Sound. An ambitious novel that writes large the hopes and anxieties of our timeclimate change, social strife, the depersonalization of the digital ageBlueprints of the Afterlife will establish Ryan Boudinot as an exceptional novelist of great daring.
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Format: paperback
ISBN:
9780802170910 (0802170919)
Publish date: January 3rd 2012
Publisher: Grove Press, Black Cat
Pages no: 430
Edition language: English
This is a very hard book to review. As I said in my updates, reading this book is like reading someone else's dream in that it's completely bizarre, it jumps around, it sometimes makes no sense, but to the person dreaming it all fits together perfectly. The writing was very good and the descriptio...
Inventive and thought-provoking, but a bit confusing. I enjoyed the writing and ideas on a sentence level, but as a whole it never quite came together for me. I could have used just a smidge more cohesion. I particularly enjoyed the scenes where surreal imagery crept into reality, such as Woo-jin's...
What a pleasant surprise....I stumbled across this book in a completely random way; after three big reading-material disappointments in one night (for instance, did you know the new William Gibson is not a book at all, but a collection of letters? and so on) and I hit whatever is the equivalent of t...