false 5 16 false false Sun Jul 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007 Sun Jul 15 21:26:58 -0700 2007 Fri Jul 20 15:34:05 -0700 2007 This is a story told through books themselves, a whodunnit, a coming-of-ager, and, for me at least, at least a whiff of self-help. (I found myself a bit too recognizable in the June Bug characters). It conforms to my idea that all good stories involve murder, (and I love books that conform to my ideas) but then it even references my idea, which I guess wasn't my idea at all, in the chapter named after the book "Deliverance": "All worthwhile tales posess some element of violence."
Some will find this book too gimmicky...the use of a syllabus outline, the visual aids, the fact that the first word of the book is dad and the last word is me (thus encapsulating the entire story arch), the final exam. I don't understand people who don't like gimmicks - I fall for literary magic tricks like a child who thinks his nose has been confiscated. But unlike that child, I love fallig for them. They make me feel that I am in the presence of someone who is not only a writer but something else entirely, something more like a mathematician, aeronautical engineer, or a miracle-performing priestess.
This book made me feel the way I did during a college lecture on Lolita, where the professor broke down Lolita by numbers, the numbers of the license plates, the hotel room numbers, etc. They all swirled and anagrammed their way into a ridiculous formula at the end. And so it turned out, that not only was Nabokov churning out a literary masterpiece, but a mathematical formula as well. Who knew? Certainly not 21-year-old Me. It might be gimmicky, but these sort of books are the literary equivalent of walking while chewing gum while playing the cello - the authors are strange maestros of many art forms. And so I've concluded that Nabokov is the silent, invisible uncle of "Special Topics", Pessl's patron saint, and not just because of the butterflies and the old professor/precocious girl pairing.
All in all, not bad for a 27-year old Barnard grad.
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