Special Topics in Calamity Physics

For reasons which remain stubbornly unclear, this novel rested on my bookshelf for about 14 years. How could I not have known what a rare and delightful read awaited me? Blue, the heroine-narrator of this tale (I love that her name is Blue; in all its connotations, it's perfect), whose sense of the ironic, the absurd, is evident from the first moments: "Before I tell you about Hannah Schneider's death, I'll tell you about my mother's." Thusly does Pessl bookend her story with a deep-set what-happens-next hook, assuring the reader will have no idea how the story will unfold or end. The mere fact that the author can weave so many story elements into whole fictional cloth is nothing short of stupendous, made even more impressive because it's a first novel. And it's quite a prodigious book, weighing in at 514 pages - about 190,000 words. (Authors, they just don't publish Big Story books like they used to.) Gareth van Meer, Blue's father, an itinerant professor of physics, by hopping from one college to another, in essence orphans his daughter. She idolizes him intellectually, and forms no real bonds of friendship until high school. The relationship between Blue, Jade, Charles, Milton, Leulah (and their favorite teacher Hannah), are tenuous although of critical importance to the story. Pessl reveals Blue, and the plot, in 36 chapters titled after (and therefore suggestive of) famous novels: Wuthering Heights, A Room With a View, Things Fall Apart, proffering a counterpoint to Pessl’s own novel and, for me, often giving pause to consider the metaphor. (This is a DIY thing.) So we have a convoluted plot, an iconoclastic structure, and absolutely brilliant writing. As a writer myself, I often asked myself how much time and thought the author put into creating her scintillating sentences and paragraphs, for indeed, they are clever, intelligent, often humorous and always, always artful: "On the very best of days I was their burden, their bête noire, and so, if you considered Newton's Third Law of Motion, 'All actions have an equal and opposite reaction,' and the five of them spontaneously turned into lil' Baby Face Nelsons and Dimples, they also had to turn into old Lost Weekends and Draculas, which best describes the looks on their faces in that instance." [p100] or "Much of what Jade swore by, when she was drunk or sober, could be trapdoors, quicksand, trompe l'oeil, the hoax of light as it speeds through the air at a variety of temperatures." [p219] or "Or else, their romance had gone flat as uncapped Pellegrino: 'The shelf life of any great love is fifteen years,' wrote Wendy Aldridge, Ph.D., in The Truth About Ever After (1999)." [p449] And in this last quotation we discover another clever trope of Pessl's, the fictitious reference to a book. There are dozens, if not hundreds, to pique the reader's interpretation. This one, like most, are made up, but in a few cases they are not. That in itself is awfully clever, and they provide a clever, powerful counterpoint to her own novel, giving one pause to consider the relationship between the two. As the pages turn and the stakes mount, we read on with contorted perceptions and freighted emotions as Blue's world dissolves into calamity physics, as the title suggests. I increasingly wondered how Pessl would end her novel. Just you wait and see. No peeking!

Don't let the title fool you. Special Topics in Calamity Physics isn't a science book. Marisha Pessl's debut novel, published in 2007, is clever and quirky and I couldn't stop turning the pages. Blue Van Meer's life has been anything but ordinary. Traveling the country with her professor father as he moves from one guest lecturer post to another has provided Blue with a thorough, if rather unconventional, education. However, like any teenager, she longs for roots and friends, and her father agrees to take a position that will allow Blue to attend St. Gallway's School for the last part of her high school education. At St. Gallway's, Blue is suddenly and somewhat reluctantly thrust into a clique called the Bluebloods, spearheaded by eccentric drama teacher Hannah Schneider. But after a drowning and then a hanging, Blue finds herself in the middle of a murder mystery with ramifications far greater- and far more personal- than she ever imagined. Not only does Special Topics In Calamity Physics tell an interesting story, it is told in an interesting way. Complete with sources referenced in parenthetical documentation, and with supporting illustrations and diagrams, Blue reveals her story almost as if it were an academic paper. The characters don't seem quite real- they are like the ultra rich, way too cool kids of movies like Cruel Intentions- a little surreal, a little more adult than my counterparts when I was that age. Their language is more adult, more academic and not full of teenaged slang. Yet the angst is very real, the chances they take, the games they play. And at the heart of it all is the enigmatic Hannah Schneider. Hannah has her own motivations for pulling together the Bluebloods and putting Blue in their midst, and as readers, we're taken along for the ride as Blue figures out why. As I mentioned, sources are well referenced in the book, and at times this was distracting. I wanted to know a bit more about the source, or else just wanted to skip over it to get to the next part of the story. However, the more I read, the less bothered I found myself. The illustrations and other visual aids did enhance the story, even on an ereader as opposed to the paperback. I wanted the story to reveal itself faster. That's not to say it was a slow read, just that I was that eager to find out the story and what happened. There's a twist at the end, which I guessed just a few pages before it was revealed. However, figuring this out takes away nothing from the story. In fact, Pessl plants just enough clues that I'd be surprised if a number of folks didn't guess the twist. I think this book is a good candidate for book clubs- the characters, the style, the plot all leave plenty of room for discussion. Checking Amazon, it looks like this is the only book Pessl has published to date. I hope she writes more. I'd love to see a second novel from her.

The above sentence is ostensibly referring to one of the characters in the book but it is so true about Pessl's writing here. (Although I found the fact of her writing this to be a subliminal advertisement for herself. There is much of that going on here--"look at what a great writer I am and how hard I worked." The author's note refers to her working 10-12 hours a day.) I found these thing off-putting, which shows how good the book was otherwise to get 5 stars from me despite these and other defects (including the buckets-full of fake, would-be clever, "references" to every passing thought the protagonist has. Enough already!. This is a wildly original and imaginative book and much of Pessl's power is due not only to her brilliant writing but also to her outstanding creativity. For example, her paragraph on what happens when, "in severe circumstances . . . you inadvertently witness a person dead" (p. 346 in hb) is precisely such an original thought, as well as so brilliantly written, it does in fact take the breath away. I read this after reading Rachel Kushner's The Flame Throwers The Flamethrowers: A Novel and think both of these outstanding young woman authors will have many more brilliant works for us. Both feature intrepid (well, sort of) young female protagonists, outstanding descriptive passages (I would give the nod here to Kushner, but just barely) but both to me are weak in staying with the plot and delivering a clear conclusion. Pessl also committed the dirty trick of revealing secrets at the end that she had not given to us before. (Am thinking specifically of p. 493, that Hannah had driven her home after her mother died.) But while I can pick away at defects--here and in Flame Throwers--I think they gnaw at me because otherwise this book--and Flame Throwers--is simply so outstanding. Ms. Pessl is coming right out of the chute as a first-time novelist but this is a work of a confident, brilliant modern genius, who seems to have us in good hands. Yes, it is long, and yes I got bored with the little clique of in-group arrogant, privileged kids, yes the "mysteries" are not clearly solved, and yes, the ending is a muddle. But I could not stop reading! That is the acid test. I suspect Ms. Pessl's work will only get stronger and more focused; it cannot become more brilliant although I look forward to her applying that brilliance to other areas of modern life.

I read Night Film and really enjoyed it, so I right away bought this book, intrigued especially by the title. Some people--a LOT of people, actually--have complained about the citations. Here's something I noticed about them. They are not "erudite," as a couple of reviewers have said. They are just the opposite. Many of the citations wedded to descriptions of characters are to what appear to be children's books of the "Animals of the World" variety. This is a kid imitating her father. About half of the rest of the citations are to boring academic writing by her father and his colleagues, which of course would be all over the house the main character grew up in, so nothing erudite there, either. And then there are the citations to books about movies, books that are not trying to look like academic studies but just mass market paperbacks. Then in among those are a tiny minority of oddball academic papers. All this goes well with the use of the canon as chapter titles. It is as if this character has no self. Hollow. So for me, the citations were there precisely to show that the main character was far from educated. Instead, she was posing at it, as a sort of shield to deflect her father's sharp tongue. And yes, that would make someone a desirable member of a study group. But it's something to be expected of a teen daughter of a pedant. She must be either a total rebel or a fawning imitator. She chooses the latter. Other reviewers describe how much love there is between the daughter and her father. Yet never once is the daughter's love for her father portrayed, except perhaps when she finds the price tag on the desk he got her and hides it rather than using it to expose his lie about its cost. The rest of the time she describes no emotion regarding her father at all, which can only cause us to conclude that she despises him. And who wouldn't? He is a blowhard and a jerk, a fail who has to traipse all over the country chasing baloney academic positions at bogus colleges, making excuses about how he is doing it for the common man, whom he in fact disdains. Visiting professorships are usually for a year, so I right away felt alarmed by the father's relentless shifting from one single-term position to the next for years. I wondered if he was repeatedly doing stuff to get him booted that we didn't hear about. Almost none of the characters are sympathetic. I can deal with slow-moving, plotless books, but somewhere there has to be a character who seems like a human being instead of a cardboard cutout who is there to say allegedly clever things. All I can say is that this author learned a lot through writing this first novel. Night Film still has too much love for cleverness, but at least that fits in with the sort of hardboiled detective type story it is. It is a far better book.

The shining star of this book is the author's ability to craft surprisingly unique similes and metaphors to describe things in a way that eschews the more traditional, mundane methods of describing things like a treeline or rain. I found myself using my Kindle's highlight function more frequently than I ever have so that I could remember my most favorite examples. The book's biggest flaw is its verbosity. The narrator references books, periodicals, quotes, and so forth with such great frequency (and often at such great lengths) that the reader is shoved headlong out of the narrative flow. At least half of these asides are unnecessary and create mental disruptions far more than they enhance the reader's experience. This is probably due in large part to the fact that nearly all of these references are 100% fictional. I love how imaginative and fascinating the author is, but these abrupt asides prevented me from getting - and staying - fully immersed in a story that was frankly already a slow, meandering tale to start with. And that leads me to my other primary complaint: pacing. The book opens by telling us quickly what the climax of the novel includes (someone's death). And yet we spend 3/4 of the novel leading very slowly up to that point. Perhaps the pacing was sluggish because of the fabricated references I mentioned above. Perhaps the story itself dragged where it could have at least walked or jogged. That said, the book's climax and denouement more than make up for a lot of the above. I've never before read a novel with so many unexpected twists and turns in such rapid fire. Wallop after wallop after wallop before the final nuclear bomb of a twist on which the book ends. What's wonderful about this whiplash ending is how many clues and hints and winks the author peppered throughout the entire novel that readers were oblivious to until the big reveals. My final gripe is the ending's muted mood. Despite the earth-shattering twists, our beloved narrator wraps up her story in a way that reminds me of a goose down feather floating slowly in the wind. I wish I could go into detail here without spoiling, but I can't. Ultimately, for the profound and impactful twists, it feels as though the author (or the narrator) ran out of steam and wasn't sure how to resolve the emotions hanging in the air. Let it be a testament to the wonderful story and the beautiful writing that despite those two major gripes, I am still confident in my 4-star rating.

I read a lot of books, and this was one of the most unique and pleasurable books I've read this year. Summary, no spoilers: This book is narrated by a young girl named Blue Van Meer. The first chapter starts out with Blue at Harvard, when she has an epiphany and decides to write about her life. Although Blue starts out telling us some things about her early years, the majority of the novel takes place during Blue's senior year in high school. Blue is an oddball, brainy child of a brilliant and eccentric professor who is constantly moving from place to place. Blue's mother died when she was very young, and her father is the main influence in her life. Blue meets and is befriended by a charismatic, beautiful teacher named Hannah Schneider. Through Hannah, she becomes part of an elite group of kids known as the Bluebloods. We know from the very first few pages of this book that Hannah has died, and as the story unfolds we learn what happened and how this has impacted Blue's life. In part coming of age novel, in part mystery, this is an absolute page-turner. It is a big novel - just over 500 pages, and the last 200 pages or so especially are exhilarating. The problem? As many a reviewer has discussed, Pessl loves her similes and puns, and the book is replete with them - in addition to many parentheticals and book (real and unreal) references. At some points it felt like a constant tic to me, and I was concerned about the author feeling the need to be so clever with every single sentence. As a reader, it becomes exhausting. Yet, yet....I was amazed how Pessl made me laugh and at the same time say some profound things in the same sentences. She is an astonishing talent. If she had just taken it down a notch in places, I think this book could have only been better. As it is, it is very, very good. I highly recommend this book. I had not read any reviews before reading this for fear of spoilers, but I had thought and now see that others have mentioned that this books is reminiscent of Donna Tartt's The Secret History both in setting and in some ways, in mood. Highly recommended. I look forward to this author's next novel. What a talent.

I recently read Night Film, Pessl's second book, and really enjoyed it so I eagerly ordered this one. The pacing is quite different in this one compared to Night Film, however. Night Film is also a large book but it never lagged or felt tedious or dull. At times this book does. I agree with those who found it too verbose, thought I understand that that is the intended style. It was entertaining for a while but began to grow a little stale. I also had some of the same issues with this book that I had with Night Film. The characters do not talk like real people and many of them feel like character sketches instead of real people. Pessl tells what the characters are like instead of showing. Some characters get described in detail only to have very little to do with the story or be dropped at a certain point (no closure for the Blueblood line of plot) and others pop in when convenient. (Like the convenience store kid who doesn't enter until Blue needs a car). At least Blue felt real, though her relationship with her father did not. Blue did seem more like a child than a teenager. Teenagers do not watch Gone with The Wind at Drive-In movie theaters with their fathers, wake up cheerfully to their dad giving them a vocab word of the day or read everything their father suggests. I think Blue's father was so overbearing (and obnoxious, there was nothing charming about him) that I would have found it much more believable if she would have completely rebelled. In fact, all through the book I found myself wishing she would say the h*** with Harvard. My other complaint is about the plot. I didn't find it at all original. The Secret History, Cracked and The Basic Eight were all similar. With better plotting and pacing I could have ignored that, but extreme wordiness in telling a story I have already heard made the story even more dull. I suppose with all the hype I expected a stronger plot and I thought the story would say more about life or have more poignant themes than it did. It seemed like a lot of garnish and not a lot of meat. I suggest skipping this and going straight to Night Film which has better pacing and a more interesting plot.

No, this book is not a series of essays by physicist and author Richard Feynman. No, it's not the cliff notes version of Physics 401. Believe it or not, this is a wildly funny yet disconcerting coming of age novel about one very intelligent teenager (Blue van Meer) with one very intelligent but restless father (Gareth van Meer). Dad is an intellectual's intellectual, constantly writing articles on foreign affairs, reading obscure tomes on every subject and endlessly giving Blue the benefit of his great wisdom. There's no mother on the scene: she was killed in a car accident when Blue was five, and Blue and Dad have moved from one visiting professorship to another all over the US, never staying more than a semester in one place. Until, that is, they arrive in Stockton, North Carolina for Blue's senior year in high school. Dad vows to stay there the entire year and Blue's coming of age really begins. She becomes involved with the mysterious Hannah Schneider, a part-time high school teacher, and her collection of protégés, five high-school seniors in Blue's class (none of whom take the slightest interest in Blue).Why Hannah has befriended Blue remains unclear, and there are persistent rumors that she has a mysterious, perhaps even a shady past. Eventually a man dies at a party at Hannah's house under very odd circumstances and Blue even imagines she sees Dad at the same party. The coincidences pile up and Blue learns some very strange truths as she emerges into adulthood and heads toward her first year at Harvard. Marisha Pessl tells a whale of a story, building literary allusions and suspense in a wobbly tandem as Blue and the reader try together to figure out what's going on. It's also a very funny book with Dad's Bourbon Moods and June Bug girlfriends and Blue's many obscure academic citations. It's hard to believe that this is a debut novel: the writing is adroit and polished, the characters are lively and interesting and the story builds, builds, builds...by the last 50 pages or so, I simply could not put it down. I'll be waiting eagerly for Pessl's next book.

LLegó justo cuando se estipuló. Llego en muy buenas condiciones, parece que al ser un libro con muchas páginas se movió un poco la portada al encuadernarlo pero no se nota a simple vista.

Comparisons between the two are most clear between Calamity Physics and Secret History. Both writers are FIERCELY and I mean FIERCELY intelligent and erudite, widely read literati; good users of language, unfurlers of a measured narrative drive, but determined to make their readers observe the countryside they are travelling through, and not just driven speedily by `what happens next' plot impatience. Both create complex, layered characters, both set their books within academia, and moreover the academia of the glitteringly brilliant. In both books, there is a charismatic, magus type teacher figure who exerts undue and ultimately destructive power over a group of young, impressionable acolytes. This is obviously a well-worn groove, which can be brilliantly done - Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie an early example of the genre, and can be, well, dire. Pessl, like Tartt, inhabits the vibrantly successful end of the spectrum, though both lack Spark's ability to pare down to the bone, and produce a piece of writing which runs clear, arrow like and lethal to its conclusion. I know that this book has garnered widely differing reviews, with some readers at screaming pitch, finding Pessl arrogant, pretentious and a show-off, and others (I'm one) absolutely savouring the literary illusions (each chapter has the title of a piece of literature which references in some way that chapter) She also does full referencing of texts .Blue is of course now a student within higher education and referencing is de rigueur. Some of the texts are real, some are there because Pessl is playing with us, and you sense the mischief. There are also what Blue calls `visual aids' scattered throughout the text - her drawings of photographs, or just her drawings, illustrating the people she is writing. And, yes the illustrations are from Pessl's doubly gifted pen. I think it comes down to, do you resonate with the author's voice - do you want to listen to what she says, does she grab your attention, or do you find her like chalk on a blackboard. I found Pessl - or rather Pessl subsumed into Blue, marvellous funny, witty, her humour sharp, dry and sometimes cruelly deadly. I guess this IS Pessl's wit, as the central character of Night Film is equally acerbic and ouchly, wickedly, funny. Where Night Film references films, Calamity Physics is literary, For a brief flavour, Blue on her father, who unfortunately was a magnet for females, whom Blue, named the June Bugs - they had an intense life in gareth van Meer's bed, just like those brilliant short summer insects, before being suddenly abandoned for a newer bug: "Dad picked up women the way certain wool pants can't help but pick up lint.For years I had a nickname for them, though I feel a little guilty using it now :June Bugs(see "Figeater Beetle", Ordinary Insects, Vol.24) There was Mona Letrovski, the actress from Chicago with wide-set eyes and dark hair on her arms who liked to shout , "Gareth, you're a fool, " with her back to him. Dad's cue to run to her, turn her around to see the Look of Bitter Longing on her face. Only Dad never turned her round to see the Bitter Longing. Instead, he stared at her back as if it were an abstract painting. Then he went into the kitchen for a glass of bourbon." Blue (and the Bluebloods) are, yes, at times operatic, self-indulgent, melodramatic, cruel and without a shred of empathy. But they are very young, still, and often this age is cruelly judgmental, especially to its peers. Experience and suffering (life) develop empathy and nuance. After having taken us through the huge events, the teenage tantrums, the cruelly funny dismissive barbs of young teens, which it is (or was) impossible for this reader to avoid laughing at, whilst wincing at the cruel put-downs, Pessl skilfully steers us to the not-so-sudden bleakness of an ending. The one we do not want, but the one which changes Blue, the one which makes her able to "feel a little guilty using it now". Blue enters bleakness, the wit and the humour suddenly ripped aside, and we suddenly are slap-bang into a depth. The ending, which I am still thinking about, still going `oh no, oh no' is perfect, and Pessl has made the reader inhabit this likeable, frightening, irritating, far too worldly, intelligent adolescent, and really engage with the journey. When I read the book again (as I surely will) I will ensure I have also read the chapter heading literary works I DON'T know, in order to gain a bit of extra nuanced flavour from the chapter it announces. It is absolutely possible to enjoy this book hugely if you are completely unfamiliar with any of the texts, but knowing them, adds a bit of spice.

auf Grund des Covers und des Titels gekauft. Ehrlich..gelesen habe ich es noch nicht, da mir immer noch die Zeit fehlt.

Beautifully written. For four nights straight I’ve gone to sleep hearing her distinctive voice. A polar bear tracking unerringly towards you on a listing floe, shambling gait hiding killer claws, and whose eyes never leave yours. (The Sterile Beauty at the End of The World, Fisher 1972)

Nice read. I really enjoyed it.