A unique, beautifully written book about that I fell in love with, got frustrated by and ended up being just good friends with.

I've decided that the best way to do justice to a book as long and complex as this one is to start by offering up my overall impressions and then sharing the detail of the experience of reading the book, based on the notes I made as I went along. There are no spoilers.

Overall Impression

"Special Topics In Calamity Physics" is a book with a personality all of its own. Reading it was like meeting a very charismatic person for the first time and being dazzled by their larger-than-life not-afraid-of-anything personal style, seduced by their erudition and left hungry for more of their stories and views on the world.

For the first half of this book, I was in love. But it's a very long book, nearly twenty-two hours of audiobook, and, just as with people, long exposure meant that, by the second half, some of the glamour rubbed thin, the erudition began to seem compulsive and irritating and I became hungry for the author to GET ON WITH IT.

By the end of the book, my admiration for it was more considered. I admired the depth of characterisation, the boldness and originality of the idea, the unashamed intellectualism of the delivery and the persistent vein of humour that kept everything human. It was an experience I wouldn't have missed.

On the other hand, I was frustrated that the book seemed to meander rather self-indulgently at times and that the impact of the bold idea was almost lost under the weight of the writing style. I was reminded of an interview with Dennis Hopper where he said that the hardest thing about making "Easy Rider" was knowing which of the perfectly shot scenes to leave out. With "Special Topics In Calamity Physics" nothing was left out.

Then there's the last chapter, "Final Exam". I hope that was humour but it felt more like a sneer.

This book may not be for everyone but I strongly recommend that you give it a try and see if it's to your taste.

My experience reading "Special Topics In Calamity Physics.

I've already posted most of these comments on BookLikes. If you're interested in seeing them in one place, please go HERE

I'm almost at the end now. Over twenty-hours listened to and less than an hour to go. 

I enjoyed the drama on the mountain and the way the impact it had on Blue and Bluebloods was covered. I found all of that believable.

Now, I've had the big reveal, which I won't share, and I'm not quite sure what to do with it.

Blue figures it all out step by step and the "it" is huge and complex and has been hidden  in plain sight all along. Now she's put a pin through it, like a dead butterfly straight from the killing jar and is turning it around in the light so I can see it from all directions. She's also providing me with the equivalent of a full set of footnotes and sources covering all evidence and inferences.

The idea really is huge and bold but the reveal has all the drama of being given a detailed technical briefing on the engines and weapons system of a Rebel TIE Fighter when what you really want to know is whether Luke will close his eyes and use the force before Vader blows him away.

So something finally happened.

Something messy, emotional, irrational, violent, cruel and irrevocable.

It happened in the presence of Blue, our main character. Not to her or by her but observed by and futilely and feebly opposed by her.

If this were John Irving, my emotions would be a mess by now. He'd have been setting me up to be ripped apart for at least a hundred pages and I would have fallen for it even as I saw it happening. But this isn't John Irving and emotional devastation isn't what Marisha Pessl seems to be aiming for.

I feel the same stunned detachment Blue does. It's a numbness I recognise and it feels more real to me than the sorrow Irving manages to drench me in at least once in every novel. Sad to say, my life is more like Blue's than not. When bad things happen, I shut the emotions down, try to do what needs to be done and, in the back of my mind, pace the cell of my distress repeating "how did this happen?" to myself.

It may seem odd but this detached response to an eruption of violent emotion has re-engaged me with the book because it seems real and familiar and yet is seldom written about.

I'm a little over halfway through this book and I have no idea what it is about, except perhaps, erudition looking for a creative outlet and pushing onwards in the hope of finding one.

Part Two has just concluded. I've no real idea of how Part 2 was distinct from Part 1 and I don't expect to find out in Part 3. 

There was a point, a few chapters ago, where I thought I might finally, like a man digging in what might be a shallow grave but could just be disturbed earth, have heard my shovel hit a solid piece of plot. There was a death. Secrets were shared. A main character seemed frayed. Our narrator appeared to be about to undergo a seismic shift in her perceptions. And then...

...she and her father went to Paris for the Christmas vacation and everything stopped.

The narrator's precocious erudition continued to war with her teenage angst and her father continued to exhibit a compulsive need to tilt at intellectual windmills and wait for applause that would never come and which he would anyway find contemptible but these things have become like the noise of a plane in motion as heard by passengers, constant but only significant if it stops unexpectedly. The whole episode in Paris might as well have been replaced with a quote from Virginia Woolf: "Time passes".

Still, to paraphrase Macbeth,

"I am in dense text
Stepped in so far that, should I read no more,
DNFng were as tedious as go o'er."

 

So, onwards to Part Three, now travelling more in hope than expectation.

Reading this book is like stepping into a fast-flowing river that comes up to just below your knees.

Your senses are assaulted by the cold, the force of the flow, the hard but hidden objects on the river bed. You struggle for balance, for a place to stand and then, if you can open your mind to it, you start to feel the river's pulse and be lulled by its song.

Of course, you know your presence distorts the flow and that you can only focus on the water as it brushes past you while the totality of the river remains beyond your grasp but that seems enough.

Then, just as you think you are in tune with the river and its ways, you see the dark, hard to discern, almost as fluid as the river itself, shapes moving with purpose through the water and soon you can focus on nothing else.

Ten hours into this twenty-one-hour-long book, I've grown used to and fond of the tumultuous flow of Blue's thoughts, laden as they are with well-documented reference sources and the way her memories of her nomadic life can create eddies that pull her thoughts off course for a while and then catapult her forward. I had begun to think of this experience as being what the book is about. Yet, so far, almost nothing has happened. Blue has been living her life without her energy being channelled by a plot.

Now though, I can see small dark pieces of narrative thrusting through the water and I'm left thinking that this may not be at all the kind of book I believed it was.

Which, of course, makes me keen to read the next eleven hours of the book.