This book is the result of an eclectic intellectual and literary history smoothies, give everything in the blender and pressed the knobs, and you have that mishmash. Main ingredient is the Baudrillardsche idea of the simulacrum, a Reality Simulation, which has taken the place of the now hops previous real reality, the world as the idea of it, where you will find nothing more than representations. A museum full of fakes, so to speak.
The author Scarlett Thomas takes this approach as an excuse, her story about the supposedly wicked-cursed Book of the lost under mysterious circumstances Victorian writer Thomas Lumas, where they can pursue their protagonist Ariel Manto, as a feverish Assioziationskette of aneinandergeflantschten pieces from at least a dozen genres to present.
Ariel Manto, first-person narrator and a doctoral student at Professor Saul Burlem, notes that just this has disappeared mysteriously. More than that, she finds the supposedly lost book, about which she wanted to write her doctoral thesis and from which her professor (the disappeared, exactly) it has dissuaded, that THE END OF MR Y on the way by chance in a small bookshop in a side street , The book, as you know, is to be cursed, let the reader disappears without a trace from the ground. So, nothing like without dinner on the sofa and read. And then ... well, then what? The book (ie this, or both, this book so and the other, the book in the book, namely, that is, as the book that you're reading itself, so both flat) is falling apart.
"Hugely Enjoyable" says The Times, and I will not deny that I am, has from time to time have a good time and sometimes intelligent book about the time I spent with him. "A Masterpiece" claimed Douglas Coupland - here contradiction! And also that it constitutes "Utter Enchantment", as the Independent quoted, I can not confirm that. The idea of the book is captivating, yes, but it is presented as a broken mirror, as a shambles, as a crude dekomponiertes and reassembled mosaic. This can not be that you will be enchanted, it is too strenuous to follow the partial abruptly changing rhythm of the narrative, the action and logic jumps, and sometimes opaque "explanations" to decipher what I added not succeed in all cases wanted. One can simply not be enchanted, because you're trying to constantly understand why the illusionist over there really so herumhampelt.
In addition an extremely strenuous protagonist whose favorite pastime is stewing in their own self-hatred, and their actions and motives - so far-fetched, the narration may be in itself - for me often were far less logically comprehensible than anything else.
THE END OF MR Y is not bad, but it is or want too much to really be good. It is a book from which you can get a headache. Scarlett Thomas throws around with Derrida, Baudrillard, Heidegger, physics, philosophy, religion and can not be avoided, you get caught and do not know how a happening and why is so mean pelted with all that stuff, you just wanted to have a little fun.
Perhaps it is even the date on which I can say that I will have Jean Baudriallard and Jacques Derrida halfway understand at least a little, and then I'm going to take this book back to the hand and Atonement do for all the bad things that I made pure ignorance have written here, but until then I can in this book do not see much more than a modern, adult, but not equal to colder and less charming ALICE IN WONDERLAND.
A book that has somehow everything, and at the end turn somehow nix.
After all, at the end of the book the question is under any of Why checked to fantastic way. Anyway, for Ariel. I myself am still waiting for that the light goes on.
