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16th out of 101 books
—
71 voters
My rating:
add to my books
The Mezzanine
Although most of the action of The Mezzanine occurs on the escalator of an office building, where its narrator is returning to work after buying shoelaces, this startlingly inventive and witty novel takes us farther than most fiction written today. It lends to milk cartons the associative richness of Marcel Proust's madeleines. It names the eight most significant advances ...more
Paperback, 144 pages
Published
January 16th 1990
by Vintage
(first published 1988)
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I feel bad about giving this book only two stars. Because Baker is a good writer. No, not just good, he is quite brilliant. It can't be easy to write a book about everyday life's nothingness. But Baker pulls it off. The novel is written in a stream-of-consciousness kind of manner, except the thoughts aren't incomplete or muddled up. The writing is perfectly articulate. Baker flows from one thought to another very smoothly. You know there are times when we find ourselves thinking of something, bu...more
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As I read/battled with/was exasperated by/yelled at/finally accepted/was tickled pink by/was strangely transformed by Nicholson Baker’s utterly brilliant not-really-a-novel various thoughts went off in my brain and made snapping cracking noises like ice breaking. It’s one of the world’s thoughtiest books, even though it’s really quite tiny, but they’re not thoughts like Einstein or Wittgenstein or Stephen Hawking, they're all eensy-weensy thoughts, it’s more like being attacked by a slow but rel...more
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...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...more
Teague
rated it
Recommends it for:
those with OCD or who are prone to non-sequitors
Shelves:
readrecently
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...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...more
The Mezzanine is a writing exercise all grown up. Nicolson Baker’s 135 page book is about nothing at all – a man enters his hotel lobby and takes the escalator to the mezzanine level. That is the entire storyline, but the main character’s firsthand narration flows from little note to trivial description, exploring all the things people think about or do every day that don’t seem to make it to the “what’s important” level. The ridges on record players and the design of staplers are considered at ...more
John
rated it
·
review of another edition
·
review of another edition
Recommends it for:
anyone who can indulge their streaming consciousness
Shelves:
re-read
there is so much to love about the tremendously micromanaged everyday minutiae that baker appreciates.
i came to this book via my experimental film and video class as a freshman at uni and it and my t.a. for the course (and now personal friend), renato umali, really changed the way i think about what literature is and can be and also consoled my fears that i was alone in the tacit consideration and appreciation of things like the smell of permanent markers, making faces at myself when...more
i came to this book via my experimental film and video class as a freshman at uni and it and my t.a. for the course (and now personal friend), renato umali, really changed the way i think about what literature is and can be and also consoled my fears that i was alone in the tacit consideration and appreciation of things like the smell of permanent markers, making faces at myself when...more
(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...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...more
I, too, have wondered, based on the handrail of an escalator moving faster than the steps, how often the handrail laps the steps! And I had to read the perforation footnote aloud to my puzzled husband trying to explain how perfect this book is, and how seriously funny it is and at the same time how the evocation of a texture of our lives -- like the perfect description of that satisfaction in the two-stage resistance of a stapler -- creates something that feels like nostalgia, but more substant...more
"This was the kind of important and secretive product that CVS stores sold--they were a whole chain dedicated to making available the small, expensive, highly specialized items that readied human bodies for human civilization. Men and women eyed each other strangely here--unusual forces of attraction and furtiveness were at work. Things were for sale whose use demanded nudity and privacy. It was more a woman's store than a man's store, but men were allowed to roam with complete fr...more
Oh, I rate everything four. I really do.
I read through most of this book and then skipped to the end. Although Baker has some gorgeous sentences (I'm particularly enamored with one at the end where he refers to bees in trash cans making "slum honey") I wasn't able to appreciate it fully. Perhaps in another century, when all of the things he describes are changed in ways we can't imagine, I might find it interesting to read about a day in the life of a corporate worker in ...more
I read through most of this book and then skipped to the end. Although Baker has some gorgeous sentences (I'm particularly enamored with one at the end where he refers to bees in trash cans making "slum honey") I wasn't able to appreciate it fully. Perhaps in another century, when all of the things he describes are changed in ways we can't imagine, I might find it interesting to read about a day in the life of a corporate worker in ...more
The Mezzanine sent my head into over analytical floptwist; the relatable introspection, the crisp details, and oh geez god...the footnotes, from up to down to across and back up again.
Options explored with footnotes: 1) Stop mid sentence, read the footnotes, come back 2) finish the tangent, go back and read the footnotes 3) screw these footnotes.
But I never chose option 3 for fear that I might miss something crucial, regarding broken shoelaces, the buoyancy of paper str...more
Options explored with footnotes: 1) Stop mid sentence, read the footnotes, come back 2) finish the tangent, go back and read the footnotes 3) screw these footnotes.
But I never chose option 3 for fear that I might miss something crucial, regarding broken shoelaces, the buoyancy of paper str...more
This was another candidate in my search for teachable, discussion-worthy, something-I-actually-like novellas/short novels for a fall class. And just because of that categorization, I went in expecting not to like it. It felt, in short, like homework.
Also, for those unfamiliar with this book, The Mezzanine is a book-planet that is almost equally composed of text and footnote. I thought, going in, it would be a more water to land ratio, with text making up the water in this kind of ob...more
Also, for those unfamiliar with this book, The Mezzanine is a book-planet that is almost equally composed of text and footnote. I thought, going in, it would be a more water to land ratio, with text making up the water in this kind of ob...more
Mariel
rated it
Recommends it for:
who are the adwizards who came up with that one?
Recommended to Mariel by:
Greg
Shelves:
claustrophobic
It is all because of Greg that I picked up The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker. It looked down on me from a high bookshelf in a local closing bookstore. "This sounds familiar. I think Greg loved it!" I thought to myself. It turns out that it is not on Greg's goodreads bookshelf at all. Paul Bryant loves it, however. He assured me that it would drive me insane. The Bryant was correct. (Baker probably was familiar to me from Joels The Fermata review about those subway hipsters.) If I were a...more
Whenever I get onto a train I look for the seat farthest from other passengers as possible. If I’m going to read, I need silence, or near silence—I need at least five or six seats distance. Finding the right seat is an exact science. This night, coming home from a concert, I enter the car and there are people spread at an infuriating equidistance apart, almost positioned on purpose at four-seat gaps to upset my four-to-six gap rule. I walk past a few shaggy night-people, including a man lurking ...more
A good primer on form fitting function? The medium is the massage? A love letter to corporate culture? A tightrope walk on the line of irony?
I feel lucky that I read Baker's later work before I read this one, because his narrative voice - hyper-aware, stylistically playful, over-the-top - seems more human when he's writing about sex. Considering that the reveries in the Mezzanine are about such civilization-defining ephemera as a paper coffee cups and plastic soda straws, there's consid...more
I feel lucky that I read Baker's later work before I read this one, because his narrative voice - hyper-aware, stylistically playful, over-the-top - seems more human when he's writing about sex. Considering that the reveries in the Mezzanine are about such civilization-defining ephemera as a paper coffee cups and plastic soda straws, there's consid...more
The complexities of office buildings and appliances often tempt authors to outrage, but Baker is only too glad to describe them exhaustively and with complete cheerfulness.
There is something admirable about this, it reminded me of childhood when I would examine the devices of the modern city with wonder instead of frustration and disapproval. It is possible that his worshipful attention to the details is a sort of criticism of the way we live, but the tone of the prose is so innocen...more
There is something admirable about this, it reminded me of childhood when I would examine the devices of the modern city with wonder instead of frustration and disapproval. It is possible that his worshipful attention to the details is a sort of criticism of the way we live, but the tone of the prose is so innocen...more
One afternoon, just prior to leaving the office for his lunch break, a nameless protagonist breaks his shoelace. This novella is about the one hour lunch break during which the lace is replaced, and so much less. The escalator in the office mezzanine serves as the central motif as our anti-hero, a modern-day Leopold Bloom, reflects on every mundane aspect of office life. Memories and factoids about everything from milk bottles, paper towels and the history of the towel dispenser to analysis of t...more
The book is endorsed by that well known writer of hilarity, Salman Rushdie, "A Seriously funny book." which may be a joke in itself.
It reminds me of being trapped at a table with someone who is determined to share their detailed and intricate memories of shoes and after the chairs have begun to bleed with boredom, and the cutlery has got up and walked away, some part of the brain dissolves and you find yourself in an hallucinatory space where the worst thing that can happen. the...more
It reminds me of being trapped at a table with someone who is determined to share their detailed and intricate memories of shoes and after the chairs have begun to bleed with boredom, and the cutlery has got up and walked away, some part of the brain dissolves and you find yourself in an hallucinatory space where the worst thing that can happen. the...more
This was Baker's first novel, and though I haven't read anything subsequent, I can hardly believe he's topped this (though reviews of his current sex-romp seem to suggest otherwise). Baker manages to turn the most mundane experiences into the profound, and vice versa, in this slim little, highly-footnoted (do the footnotes exceed the text itself?) novel. A book where the present action takes place entirely over the course of a ride up an escalator hardly deserves to be as brilliant as this one. ...more
I really liked this little book, and I actually like the long aside footnotes, which is kind of rare.
Is it cliche to say that this book really describes, "the human experience"? Probably. But that's a shorthand for saying that Baker has a way of describing experiences, you might have thought were unique in a way that makes them seem personable and knowable all at once. Like perhaps everyone feels that way. There are many beautiful tiny moments throughout this book. I...more
Nicholson Baker's novels are examples of of trying to imbue the minute trivialities of modern life with unseen philosophical and personal significance. Exhibiting an affinity for minutiae and ponderous disquisition, he is noted for transforming otherwise banal human activities into finely wrought descriptions of thought and serious consideration. His technique of extreme magnification and loitering contemplation has been described as creating a “clogging” effect in his fiction, thus slowing narr...more
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.
This is a sometimes brilliant and profound book that, unfortunately, is quickly becoming dated. At the same time, this very datedness illuminates what I believe is the book's core message.
As you probably know from the hundreds of other reviews, this is a book about mundane objects, and the obsessive fascination that these objects hold for the narrator. Baker is the type of author that writes about mundane things that most, if not all, of us think about but never imagine that others...more
As you probably know from the hundreds of other reviews, this is a book about mundane objects, and the obsessive fascination that these objects hold for the narrator. Baker is the type of author that writes about mundane things that most, if not all, of us think about but never imagine that others...more
This is a second chance book - the first time I tried to read it, I couldn't make it past the first twenty pages. A few years later, I gave it another shot, and enjoyed it.
Mezzanine is a clever book about the modern condition of the office worker. If it'd come out last year, it'd be banal, but since it was published in the mid-80s, it's actually a bit of a trailblazer. It's written from the point of view of a guy who narrates intensely on the meticulous inner workings of everything ...more
Mezzanine is a clever book about the modern condition of the office worker. If it'd come out last year, it'd be banal, but since it was published in the mid-80s, it's actually a bit of a trailblazer. It's written from the point of view of a guy who narrates intensely on the meticulous inner workings of everything ...more
Baker has a delicious vocabulary and an obsession for detail that he unleashes in this over-the-top detailed description of one man on his lunch hour. Footnotes abound (they sometimes take up half of the page) creating a structural metaphor for the character's concurrent intellectual, emotional and philosophical contemplations. Validating for anyone who's discovered when asked, "What are you thinking?" that they were thinking of ten or a hundred different things just at that moment.
...more
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I picked this book up at a library's basement book sale after reading the summary, praise for, and the first few paragraphs. It seemed to be the sort of book I'd like, crafted with excellent and challenging sentences, a nice sprinkling of new vocabulary and the sort of x-ray analysis and relentless reductionism of life's little rituals and ones own memories, that I seem to enjoy, or think I would enjoy. Even on that first brief look I could see the ways in which Baker had influenced David Foster...more
This book was a slow starter, and it's slow throughout--almost nothing happens, as many of its more critical reviewers have pointed out--but it's also a unique and rewarding read. Despite its unusual form--Baker uses footnotes in order to digress from the digressions that constitute the main narrative, most notably in one memorable footnote about footnotes--the Mezzanine is a remarkably sincere and deeply considered work. Parts of it are interminable, such as Baker's extended discussion of rep...more
It literally took me 10 years to read this book. I started it in my junior year of college, trudging through the first 50 pages or so, then pitch it on the bottom of a storage bin. I recently rediscovered it and felt that I would appreciate it more now. I have found that history does indeed repeat itself. I dislike this book, not because I do not find beauty or humor in everyday things or situations, but rather this character then and now seems like a big joke. The 135 pages could give me less r...more
First read this in October 2007 and delightedly re-read 4 years later. Perhaps it is the absence of conventional plot, but I really only remembered a small percent and might as well have been reading for the first time.
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. He thinks at considerable and very amusing length on t...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. He thinks at considerable and very amusing length on t...more
Let's just say, this was the longest 135-page book I've ever read. I knew going in that it was a stream-of-consciousness, footnote-heavy, type of ramble. I'm okay with that style, and I even relate to it. If I were to write a book, I'd certainly want to go off on tangents and riff about random things. But, I just didn't connect with the mind that was being presented here. This could be misconstrued, but there was something so "male" about the author's thought process. Or, at leas...more
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| I love the Mezzanine | 5 | 47 | Jul 18, 2011 07:52am |
Nicholson Baker is a contemporary American writer of fiction and non-fiction. As a novelist, his writings focus on minute inspection of his characters' and narrators' stream of consciousness. His unconventional novels deal with topics such as voyeurism and planned assassination, and they generally de-emphasize narrative in favor of intense character work. Baker's enthusiasts appreciate his ability...more
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“The neurons that do expire are the ones that made imitation possible. When you are capable of skillful imitation, the sweep of choices before you is too large; but when your brain loses its spare capacity, and along with it some agility, some joy in winging it, and the ambition to do things that don't suit it, then you finally have to settle down to do well the few things that your brain really can do well--the rest no longer seems pressing and distracting, because it is now permanently out of reach. The feeling that you are stupider than you were is what finally interests you in the really complex subjects of life: in change, in experience, in the ways other people have adjusted to disappointment and narrowed ability. You realize that you are no prodigy, your shoulders relax, and you begin to look around you, seeing local color unrivaled by blue glows of algebra and abstraction.”
—
8 people liked it
“Perforation! Shout it out! The deliberate punctuated weakening of paper and cardboard so that it will tear along an intended path, leaving a row of fine-haired pills or tuftlets on each new edge! It is a staggering conception, showing an age-transforming feel for the unique properties of pulped wood fiber.”
—
6 people liked it
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