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835 ratings, 4.03 average rating, 108 reviews
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published
January 16th 1990
(first published 2006)
by Vintage
binding
Paperback, 144 pages
isbn
0679725768
(isbn13: 9780679725763)
description
Turns an ordinary ride up an office escalator into a meditation on our relations with familiar objects--shoelaces, straws, and more. Baker's debut nov...more
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| I love the Mezzanine | 1 | 10 | 07/18/2007 11:23AM |
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other reviews (showing 1-20 of 1107)
It's hard to rate this book, because on many levels it is brilliant. Just brilliant. Yet, lets just say, there is not much narrative tension and that is an understatement of the century.
The writer is hilarious. And the character, a complete nerd who cannot stop thinking about the most mundane daily activities that we all don't bother thinking about, is amazingly well developed in merely 120 pages.
So, basically it's about a man who leaves his office to find new shoelaces. That is the bo...more
The writer is hilarious. And the character, a complete nerd who cannot stop thinking about the most mundane daily activities that we all don't bother thinking about, is amazingly well developed in merely 120 pages.
So, basically it's about a man who leaves his office to find new shoelaces. That is the bo...more
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Read in June, 2007
recommends it for:
those with OCD or who are prone to non-sequitors
I really loved this book. I've not read many novels since high school, and thus don't have a lot to compare it to, but I think it might now be my favorite book.
To give away the plot: Man rides up escalator, thinks about stuff. That's it -- no other characters, no "rising action," or whatever they called it in English class, but it's still dazzling and engaging. Nicholson Baker picks up little details and riffs on them, spending pages nesting digression within digression (with t...more
To give away the plot: Man rides up escalator, thinks about stuff. That's it -- no other characters, no "rising action," or whatever they called it in English class, but it's still dazzling and engaging. Nicholson Baker picks up little details and riffs on them, spending pages nesting digression within digression (with t...more
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Read in January, 2001
(written 1/2001)
The intricacies of human life and culture here in America - beautiful in its completeness. Overanalyzing and reporting objectively so you can't help but look at your own life the same way.
The periodicity of conversations, periodicity of thoughts in a year... theme of speculating exactly how his shoelaces both broke within two days, after two years of being worn.
On hot blow dryers in bathrooms:
"Come to your senses, World! ... How can you let your marketing men ...more
The intricacies of human life and culture here in America - beautiful in its completeness. Overanalyzing and reporting objectively so you can't help but look at your own life the same way.
The periodicity of conversations, periodicity of thoughts in a year... theme of speculating exactly how his shoelaces both broke within two days, after two years of being worn.
On hot blow dryers in bathrooms:
"Come to your senses, World! ... How can you let your marketing men ...more
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Read in June, 1999
This is my favorite of Nicholson Baker's goofy, brilliant little novels. In its hundred-something pages describing a nondescript character's slow-motion recollections of the material world of his past - the hundreds of archaic mechanisms that've been phased out, the details we take for granted - one repeatedly comes across unexpectedly touching gems of description. Yet Baker never seems to be showboating: his descriptions are always on-par, yet effortless and smooth.
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This book taught me how to raise the seat of a toilet in barrooms and office buildings etc with my foot. And the climax (SPOILER WARNING): a jar of Hellmann's mayo rotating on the price-scanner thing at the supermarket checkout -- get it? Hell. Man.
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Read in October, 2008
I'm not one for plot-heavy books. Which is why I adore Mezzanine, in which the entire plot consists of some guy going up an escalator. Nicholson Baker has the ability to appreciate the funniest little things like the way milk cartons work and what it feels like to use a stapler and what you think about when you're riding the escalator, and even though it's kind of meant to be funny I think he's pretty sincere about it. The main character works in an office and I know from experience that work...more
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Read in January, 2001
My favorite excerpt (partial):
Subject of Thought # of Times Occurred per Year
intelligence, going fast 14.0
wheelchair ramps, their insane danger 14.0
urge to kill 13.0
straws float now 10.0
"if you can't ...more
Subject of Thought # of Times Occurred per Year
intelligence, going fast 14.0
wheelchair ramps, their insane danger 14.0
urge to kill 13.0
straws float now 10.0
"if you can't ...more
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Read in June, 2008
recommended to Life on Mars by:
Life on Mars book club
From Publishers Weekly: Baker's irresistibly readable short novel presents the quirky and often hilarious inner life of a thoroughly modern office worker. With high wit and in precisely articulated prose, the unnamed narrator examines, in minute and comically digressive detail, the little things in life that illustrate how one addresses a problem or a new idea: the plastic straw (and its annoying tendency to float), the vacuous civilities of office chatter, doorknobs, neckties, escalators and th...more
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Read in March, 2008
Why is it that so many of these entries begin with explanations of why it took me quite so long to get around to reading the book?
In the case of The Mezzanine, for years, friends both writer and secular have cried to me - "You gotta read Nicholson Baker!" But whenever I asked what sort of stuff he wrote, I inevitably ended up with a vague description that sounded somewhat like Penthouse letters written with artsy skill, and I like to keep my literature and my smut separated wheneve...more
In the case of The Mezzanine, for years, friends both writer and secular have cried to me - "You gotta read Nicholson Baker!" But whenever I asked what sort of stuff he wrote, I inevitably ended up with a vague description that sounded somewhat like Penthouse letters written with artsy skill, and I like to keep my literature and my smut separated wheneve...more
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Read in January, 2008
I have mixed feelings about this novel. On one hand, I think it is very skillfully written and develops a very interesting concept. On the other hand, I’m appreciative of the fact that it was only 144 pages in length.
The Mezzanine is basically about a man going up an escalator in the mezzanine of the building he works in after a lunch break. This, of course, is only the platform for the character to fully develop and articulate every thought that pops in to his head during this escal...more
The Mezzanine is basically about a man going up an escalator in the mezzanine of the building he works in after a lunch break. This, of course, is only the platform for the character to fully develop and articulate every thought that pops in to his head during this escal...more
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The year after I finished grad school, K__, one of my female classmates, was in a book reading group populated by 3 other women, all of whom had graduate education. K__ told me that she wanted me to join the group to add some "male energy" and she thought my opinionated nature and tastes in books would liven things up. Only a few weeks earlier, I'd started reading this book. More on that below.
When I agreed to join her book group, I sat through one cycle of books -- I can't re...more
When I agreed to join her book group, I sat through one cycle of books -- I can't re...more
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Read in June, 2000
Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine (Vintage, 1988)
Nicholson Baker's first novel gives us a day-- okay, half a day-- in the life of an ordinary office worker. It's pretty close to being the typical eighties novel. It's not really about anything. No one makes great personality changes anywhere in the novel. There's only one other character, aside from a few minor ones, sales clerks and the like. The book opens with the main character walking into the lobby of his office building, and ends with him s...more
Nicholson Baker's first novel gives us a day-- okay, half a day-- in the life of an ordinary office worker. It's pretty close to being the typical eighties novel. It's not really about anything. No one makes great personality changes anywhere in the novel. There's only one other character, aside from a few minor ones, sales clerks and the like. The book opens with the main character walking into the lobby of his office building, and ends with him s...more
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Has a copy to sell/swap
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Read in December, 2007
recommended to Ubie by:
yesrecommends it for: everyone
i was recomended this book by my friend Ryan who told me thet he loved finding books that had completely different perspectives or narratives then any other book he had read. Well, he was completely right, this book and its author and or character look at life from a very scientific perspective bringing across the ideas behind the creation of esculators to whether or not the electric hand dryer serves as a more economicly and environmentally contious way to dry ones hands in the bathroom or not...more
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Read in October, 2007
This was recommended by Brianna (is she on this thing?) as I described "Life A Users Manual" and there is some conceptual similarity - the escalator as a structural device comparable to the apartment building.
While approaching and riding an escalator one flight back to work at a conventional office job, having purchased both lunch and shoelaces, the narrator free-associates 20 years back and several years forward in his life...more
While approaching and riding an escalator one flight back to work at a conventional office job, having purchased both lunch and shoelaces, the narrator free-associates 20 years back and several years forward in his life...more
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Read in November, 2008
I can't quite remember who recommended The Mezzanine to me or why. It may have been to see a father to heavily footnoted digressive novelists like Dave Eggers or David Foster Wallace; it may have been to enjoy a novel that reads more like hypertext, more like the experience of wandering through Wikipedia for an hour and not being sure what concrete knowledge you've acquired for the effort.
But Baker's novel has an actual point within, and it's a meditation on bringing some of our passing thou...more
But Baker's novel has an actual point within, and it's a meditation on bringing some of our passing thou...more
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Read in August, 2007
recommends it for:
Sara
This book is a a great setup -- the entire novel takes place in the narrator's head on one escalator ride after his lunch break. Baker sells the reader on the premise by constructing a narrator who is critically focused on the minutae that make a modern life. Not existential angst, but the change in men's rooms from paper towel dispensers to hand dryers with blowers. I've got this idea that one of the big selling points of Moby Dick through the 20th Century was that it carefully dealt with the m...more
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Read in May, 2007
This extremely slender novel (only 135 pages) is probably the densest study of the minutiae of life I’ve ever encountered—and is probably kept to a minimal length to make it consumable. The entire plot of the novel (there is no plot, but rather the storyline) revolves around the protagonist breaking his shoelace, buying a replacement set of shoelaces during his lunch break, and riding up an escalator back to his job.
Yet even in so humdrum a setting, he delves in with a forensic scientistâ€...more
Yet even in so humdrum a setting, he delves in with a forensic scientistâ€...more
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Read in July, 2006
recommends it for:
visual people!!!
if you enjoy highly detailed stream of consciousness writing, then this book is for you. the writer documents things in the main character's daily life as simple as paper cups and shoelaces and draws from these objects the most microscopic of observations. It's not only these minute and clever obseravtions that make the book interesting, but the accuracy in which this style of writing reflects the tides and sweeps of the mind of an extremely aware, perceptive and visual person.
read this boo...more
read this boo...more
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Not entirely what I thought it would be, but very enjoyable none-the-less. I was initially turned off by the constant use of lengthy footnotes, but eventually learned to accept them and the book would not have been possible without them so what are you gonna do? Anyway, Nicholson Baker is obviously one self-aware kinda guy to have noticed so many of his own little unconscious rituals and to have described them in such honest prose. I found myself constantly thinking, "oh my god, I do that t...more
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Read in July, 2005
Nicholson Baker's obsessive attension to detail is what drives the slim novel. Based around a man buying a pair of shoelaces on a lunch break, the novel expands to be about much more. The main characters own mental infatuation with miniature is reflected in Baker's writing style: his long-winded (but what a thoroughly enjoyable wind it is), digressions, his reliance on footnotes (to engage in said digressions) and his spot on observations about real world things (black penguin paperbacks, floati...more
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