Sunday Salon - August 3

Soooo... I am trying to think where I have heard of the Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl first... but I have no clue. As this is one of the books I am currently reading I have decided my first Sunday Salon post should be about this novel.

Today I could not spend as much time with it as much I would have liked to as we are going for a Portland, OR + Oregon coast vacation on Monday and you can imagine how chaotic it can be with a 6-year-old, who wants to take all his library books (17 at this point) with him, not accepting no as an answer. (Deep sigh. And another suitcase. It will become handy not just for my son's books but for my usual visit at Powell's.)

Anyway, back to Marisha Pessl and her Physics.

First of all, this is of course not a science book (took me a while till I conviced my librarian to look it up for me in the newly returned Fiction section instead of telling me over and over that she could not find it among the Science Books), instead a 450+ page book about a genius (bookworm!) teenager. The structure of the novel is very bookish as well: each chapter is titled after a famous literary piece (Othello, Wuthering Heights, Madame Bovary, etc.) for instance, the TOC is called "Core Curriculum (Required Reading) ", and in the end we are getting a final exam of the read content.

I can't tell you a lot about the story as I have just started it and gotten to the 50th (or so) page. The protagonist is Blue van Meer (she is telling the story), a daughter of a well-known college prof of Pol Sci, who makes it his life goal to live (and teach) at least 3 cities of the US each year. (His wife, Blue's mom died when she was a kindergartener.) According to the cover the storyline will include a certain kind of murder mystery as well as other characteristics of a picaresque novel. We'll see.

The writing is not too serious, very easy to follow, kind of a chatty like a young adult text. And although it is seemingly heavy with all kinds of literary references, these are mainly for ironic purposes as most of them are imaginary titles and authors.

The reason why I started it is, that I heard a whole lot of great things about this book, but unfortunately a couple of days ago I managed to read the CR's opinion and that - for some reason - totally put me off. In spite of the fact that I have the impression the CR is too strict in its judgement - overly particular about to whom it gives an "A". (Sometimes I feel them totally unfair and incorrect.) The funny thing is, that in the end the Special Topics got a B from them, which is theoretically not too bad at all, but the review itself does not contain one single positive sentence about the novel!

Again: the book is pretty enjoyable, and I am kind of ashamed how much a negative review can influence my feelings toward it - and now it is much harder for me to get on with this new reading of mine.

Anyhow, for our trip I am taking another book with me, a new(er) novel of one of the best-known Hungarian writers: Ondrok gödre by Imre Oravecz (a few works - a volume of prose poetry, some short stories and poems - of his were translated into English and available at amazon as well if you are interested although not this one as far as I know). So it is very possible that I am taking a break from Ms Pessl next week but definitely planning to finish it as soon as possible after that.

Happy next week everyone!