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Rating:
I'm not convinced I can pull off the task: I have the flaw of engaging in what might be termed a "cosmic break" or worse, a "break of balls".
Reviewing, or rather attempting to review, a book like this is a tough job, which could lead to a total embarrassment of <hide yourself, it's better!> The above written equals "Attention pregnant women, children and heart patients, do not cross this line!"
Here I go...: One of the Best Books of the genre I've ever read, considering that it is the first of the author and deals with the "pure abstract": words, concepts, computers, parallel universes (n.d.s. Prof. Max Tegmark Dept. of Physics, MIT) and maybe even "quantum theory".
Steven Hall chooses an exceptional narrator: Eric Sanderson, the protagonist, who is actually one with the First Eric Sanderson, who will appear with letters that will arrive daily and for months to his successor (the content of these writings indicates ways to defend against the Ludovician, a conceptual shark, which has annihilated the First Sanderson by devouring his mind). The story begins on the bedroom floor of Eric at the moment when... is reborn:
<<I was unconscious. I had stopped breathing.
Not sure for how long, but the engines and the control units that keep the human machine operating at a mechanical level must have shut down, reacting to the immobility with a general system arrest. Automatic pilot failure - switch to manual emergency control.
That's how my life began, my second life>>.
Eric Sanderson remembers nothing, absolutely empty of memories: he doesn't know who he is, where he is, what he does or did, he looks in the mirror and doesn't recognize himself... he is alone. He searches among the objects surrounding him and... "finds himself"... a name (his), another name with a phone number (his psychiatrist) and post-its, many, scattered everywhere with the names of the things they are attached to, with the most disparate indications... fragments of life gone by, but by Whom? Where? When?
My God: if this is the beginning, what will be in the sequel (!?!)... well: many absurd things, many absurd stories, many absurd places like "The Non-Space", located in basements, abandoned warehouses, in the <gaps> of the world where no one finds you because the walls built with books, letters, newspapers, phone directories, in short, with printed paper, make you invisible and protect you with their conceptual flows from the attacks of SHARKS!
There are also bits of normal life, which flow beneficially into the eyes and mind of the reader, who finds a bit of neuronal rest: it's like a time out, necessary!
-Scout (or Clio, his lost love on the island of Naxos) is passionate, tender yet unpredictable; their dialogues on love, on remembering and forgetting, essentially on everything that makes us human, are inexplicably comprehensible.
-Fidorous is the professor, friend of the First Eric Sarderson, who will help him make the Ludovician disappear: the final clash takes place in open sea, which is a <concept> of sea, on the ship Orpheus, which is a <concept> of a ship and everyone, including the readers, must strive to keep the <concept> alive or the ship can never materialize and set sail...
-Mycroft Ward never appears, actually, he is the cause of all evils, the PUPPET MASTER: he was a man who, capable of cloning himself through computer networks, has become eternal and multiplies indefinitely, acquiring and integrating data and identities of millions of unsuspecting people.
The relentless narrative and frenetic pace make life difficult for the reader, sometimes it seems impossible to visualize...yet, if you concentrate, everything appears to you in its most real absurdity. It's all unreasonably true... and exaggerated.
Page 430: The end, but... who knows, maybe..., perhaps..., I don't know...
P.S.: References to Matrix and Jaws? Probable, Mark Haddon is convinced of it. But what if it were a great puzzle (100008 pieces) to be reconstructed with Eric?
Oh dear, oh dear, then I see it really tough: GAME OVER!
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