BookMooch logo
 
home browse about join login
Marisha Pessl : Special Topics in Calamity Physics
?



Author: Marisha Pessl
Title: Special Topics in Calamity Physics
Moochable copies: No copies available
Amazon suggests:
>
Recommended:
>
Topics:
>
Published in: English
Binding: Paperback
Pages:
Date: 2007-04-05
ISBN: 014102917X
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Weight: 0.79 pounds
Size: 4.41 x 6.93 x 1.73 inches
Edition: Export ed
Previous givers:
13
>
Previous moochers:
13
>
Wishlists:
16
>
Reviews: John Alwyine-Mosely (United Kingdom) (2008/09/01):
So the novel is brilliant, rubbish or what?
This famous Sufi story sums up the conflict around Marisha Pessl début novel "Special Topics in Calamity Physics":

A judge in a village court had gone on vacation. Nasrudin was asked to be temporary judge for a day. Nasrudin sat on the Judge's chair with a serious face, gazing around the public and ordered the first case be brought-up for hearing.
"You are right," said Nasrudin after hearing one side.
"You are right," he said after hearing the other side.
"But both cannot be right," said a member of public sitting in the audience.
"You are right, too" said Nasrudin.

So is it juvenile rubbish written by a writer who has… a tin ear for prose. There is a page-by-page cascade of dreadful extended metaphors and distractingly inappropriate similes. Or is it the…most flashily erudite first novel since Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated. With its pirouettes and cartwheels, its tireless annotations and digressions, it has a similar whiz-kid eagerness to wow the reader.

Plot, Genre and what the F**k is going on
To see which way I sit, let’s start with Plot. The novel is mainly about the senior year of Blue Van Meer at a yuppie private school where her Father teaches political science. She is very bright and heading for being the top of the year on her way to Harvard. Hannah a film professor who bewitches the clever/social elite of the college befriends Blue. They are bitterly opposed to Blue’s presence and this is made plain in her treatment over the year but she is attracted to one of the pack and perhaps its mutual.

And there was Milton, sturdy and grim with a big, cushiony body like someone’s favorite reading chair in need of reupholstering…He was eighteen but looked thirty. His face , cluttered with brown eyes, curly black hair, a swollen mouth, had a curdled handsomeness to it, as if, incredibly, it wasn’t what it’d once been.

But another loves her and she can’t see past him being a jock and nice guy. So here we have the elements for High School satire.

click here if you want to read more http://tinyurl.com/68w9at



URL: http://bookmooch.com/014102917X
large book cover

WISHLIST ADD >

SAVE FOR LATER >

AMAZON >

OTHER WEB SITES >

RELATED EDITIONS >

RECOMMEND >

REFRESH DATA >