Her writing style was infuriating to me--so smug, as though she felt just so very clever for coming up with all those similes. I should have made a drinking game out of reading this book, because if I'd had a sip of liquor every time she used an outlandish simile that was totally off the mark, I'd be too drunk to type now. Now, some of her similes were extremely clever and spot-on--but maybe 2/3 of them were eye-roll inducing. Also, she had an annoying tendency to assign action verbs to inanimate objects in order to make the writing "snap" on the page. It felt very much like an affect. Then again, Sinclair Lewis once described a windowsill as "lugubrious." But then again, I don't really care for Sinclair Lewis either.

The characters were all just so unlikable as well--I don't think all book characters have to be saintly, but there should be at least one person you find likable. Oh, wait, there is one extremely secondary character who has some redeeming features.

The book could have been about 400 pages shorter (I was reading the large-print edition--which was just over 900 pages). She really needed a better editor.

The only thing that kept me reading was the plot, trying to find out, first of all, if it were going to GO anywhere (the novel started painfully slowly). Then, once the big tragic events unfolded, I read to find out what happened. Was the payoff worth it? Not really, not for me.

Bottom line: the book is clever, but not as clever as it thinks it is.

My initial interest in this book was mainly down to the fact that I had read numerous reviews comparing it to Donna Tartt's The Secret History, one of my favourite novels of all time. Having finished it, I can now say with confidence that these comparisons are fairly inaccurate and really quite lazy. The obvious similarity between the books is that both concern an elite group of young people in an academic setting (in this case, a much-admired clique known as the 'Bluebloods' in an American high school) whose friendships are torn apart by an unexpected death. Otherwise, they are entirely different; Special Topics in Calamity Physics is a very odd book - in fact, it's one of the strangest I have ever read.

At first, I felt sure I was going to dislike the novel. For a start, there's the narrative voice; Blue van Meer is an extremely precocious sixteen-year-old girl who narrates the story using constant references, comparing everything to something else (the book would probably be about a third of its actual length if Blue's incessant metaphors and similies were removed). The style is exhausting, and the continual attempts to cram as many references as possible into each sentence quickly become irritating. Blue's narration is smug and self-satisfied, and it's hard to reconcile this with the fact that the character is apparently a 'wallflower' with little confidence and no real friends other than her fiercely academic father. The characterisation is also, if not exactly bad, then strange - it's difficult to believe that the Bluebloods would actually be friends with each other (or that they would command the respect and awe they mysteriously seem to enjoy from their peers), let alone accept Blue into their clique, however reluctantly. They aren't remotely believable; they come across as a crudely drawn gallery of grotesques, none of whom you can envisage as real people. In fact, none of the characters are at all likeable - including Hannah, the supposedly charismatic teacher at the centre of the Bluebloods' friendship - although this is perhaps intentional.

However, despite its imperfections, the book did draw me in. For all that it irritated me, I never once thought about not finishing it, and around halfway through (once all the largely unnecessary exposition was out of the way) I found myself hooked. I was genuinely intrigued by the mystery surrounding Hannah's identity, which deepens in the final third, and I found the eventual denouement thrilling, with the way the tale unravelled coming as a genuine surprise. Incredibly (given the length of the novel), when I reached the final page, I actually found myself wishing there was more.

There are touches of brilliance in this book, but it's deeply flawed. On one hand, it's impressive that Pessl completed such a lengthy, complex debut at a relatively young age (27); on the other, her immaturity as a writer is evident in its faults. Her skill, wit and intelligence shine through sporadically, only to be obscured by unnecessary detail or missed opportunities - we really don't need to know the exact minutiae of every tiny thing that happens to Blue, and yet the chapters explaining her conclusions about Hannah's death and the conspiracy surrounding it could have benefited from more detail. Special Topics left me feeling that Pessl is a hugely talented writer, but one still finding her feet, and yet to produce her magnum opus. It's worth reading (if you're a persistent reader, that is), but expect an impressive yet imperfect piece of work, not an absolute masterpiece. In any case, it's certainly left me feeling curious about what the author will do next.

DNF@200+ pages.

In the past, I didn't hesitate to give Marisha Pessl's Night Film 5 stars rating (my review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), but with Special Topics in Calamity Physics...I really was struggling to hang onto this book...

After reading 170+ pages, I realize John Green should have written this book, because he seems to know more about writing an interesting story about geeks, smartasses and bookish teenagers than Ms. Pessl.

I don't know how Pessl managed to do this, but after two murder cases, I found I can no longer bring myself to care about this story and the characters anymore. Those characters have very interesting settings but in the end...they are unlikable and dull.

Let me start by saying that I did like this book. I did. Ms. Pessl is probably too smart for her own good, but that's never stopped me before.

That said, as with most over-intelectualized writings, I had trouble getting close to her, to her work. There's such a lot of time spent obfuscating, demonstrating how clever she is, developing stacked metaphors and allusions, that the story is difficult to get lost in. You are constantly reminded that you are reading a novel by a very smart young lady. And while some of the characters are extensively developed (Hannah, Jade, Blue's father), most of the others, including our "heroine," Blue, remain very flat. She, most of all, has so little emotion that it's difficult to believe her on the few occasions when she freaks out; when she cries or yells, you wonder, "Where did that come from?"

Also, some of my friends have complained (rightly) that the last fifty-ish pages seem to belong to a completely different book, that everything changes drastically right at the end, without ample warning. Which: true, true. Although I guess that didn't bother me so much, because of course once it switches you can go, "Oh so that's why that happened, and that, and that." But still I guess it was a little hard to swallow.

In any case, the book is definitely compelling, interesting, imaginative, original, etc., etc., etc. And really, it's only her first book, so she's got lots of time to improve. I'll read her next one, for sure.

My commute to work is 60 minutes to and from and I listened to this book on those trips, so it took me a while to finish it. There were 17 discs in all. The narrator was quite good and I enjoyed this very much. This is a book about the love of learning as much as it is about anything.

Despite the title, this is not a story about physics. A sixteen year old girl named Blue Van Meer is the main character. She and her father are very close as there are only the two of them in their small family. Blue's mother was killed in a car accident when Blue was five and her father is an orphan. No relatives or friends clutter their lives. They are both committed intellectuals and have fun, as they are flitting from town to town memorizing long poems and passages from famous literature. Gareth dislikes staying for very long anywhere and since he is a distinguished Harvard alum is able to get jobs at various universities for a semester at a time. They move a lot.

Gareth decides Blue will spend her senior year at a prestigious prep school in North Carolina, which has a reputation for getting its students into Harvard. Harvard admittance is his and Blue's main goal in life. Here, Blue makes friends for the first time in her life, sort of. Remember, these are teenagers at a prep school, so they are cruel and barbarous through and through. Eventually, Blue is accepted into their little group, the Bluebloods, primarily because of the intervention of a teacher who is their mentor. Hannah Schneider is beautiful, smart and manipulative. She makes Jean Brodie look like a bunny rabbit.

We find out at the beginning that Hannah has killed herself. Blue tries to unravel this mystery and several others and finds herself more alone than she has ever been.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics is a puzzle, a Rubik's Cube of a story created by Puzzlemaster Marisha Pessl. You receive all the information needed to solve the puzzle throughout your reading, but it's not until the end, when each side of the cube is perfectly constructed, that you see the Blinding Truth.

The sides of Pessl's Cube aren't basic colors. Instead of fashioning rows and columns of nine small blue squares on one side, nine yellow squares on another, nine red, nine green, nine orange, nine white, you twist and turn to find the sides of the cube are assembled of quotations from literary texts.

Side 1: The Secret History (Tartt 1992)
Side 2: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Doyle 1892)
Side 3: Metamorphoses (Ovid 8)
Side 4: Whereabouts (Swithin 1917); a travelogue by British essayist Horace Lloyd Swithin, a fictional man
Side 5: Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders (Bugliosi 1974)
Side 6: Das Kapital (Marx 1867)

Solving this puzzle requires immense esoteric knowledge, knowledge that the average reader will not have. Enter Blue van Meer, 16 years old and smarter than you'll ever be. She's a lovely protagonist because she gets to the core of what these Secret History-esque stories are all about: belonging. She's an outsider who infiltrates an established group and finds herself. Sort of. There's a line in Special Topics where Blue says she once felt like a smudge but after joining the exclusive Bluebloods group, she feels like a straight black line.

I get so happy when a character becomes a defined, concrete line. But Pessl illuminates the dark side of this black line too. By belonging, we lose ourselves. By belonging, we open ourselves to hurt. People no longer own themselves when they place themselves in a group. As soon as you attach your lifestory to another's, you lose control and suffer the consequences.

But what's most incredible about Special Topics is its discussion of these deeper themes accompanied by a thrilling story. Nothing is what it seems. For many readers, I expect the first half might be difficult to get through. The story builds to a moment that has already been spoiled in the introduction. Also: the narration is wacky. Blue has an extraordinary cultural lexicon that she mines in order to pack her writing with fake references, real but very obscure references, multiple parenthetical asides in a single sentence, Concepts Written With Capitalized Letters To Endow Them With Greater Significance, and questionable metaphors (example A: "I was forgotten like Line 2 on a Corporate Headquarters Switchboard;" example B: "a wound that squirts blood like a grape Capri Sun").

The writing is frenetic and dense, but to use a questionable metaphor of my own, I found the prose like Chipmunkified music. You know, those songs that have been upped--both pitched up and sped up--to mimic the voices of speaking tree-dwelling rodents. When I hear a normal song destroyed like that, I first think, "How awful!" But somewhere between the second chorus and the bridge, I am swayed. I start to think, "Maybe the song is better like this." So it goes with the writing. It's gimmicky and snappy and amazing and awful all at once but after a while, it sinks into your brain and it's intoxicating, absolutely perfect for what's being said.

So give in to the music and start trying to solve the puzzle (you won't). But after reading, you will feel like this:

n  

Very few people realize, there's no point chasing after answers to life's important questions. They all have fickle, highly whimsical minds of their own. Nevertheless. If you're patient, if you don't rush them, when they're ready, they'll smash into you. And don't be surprised if afterwards you're speechless and there are cartoon tweety birds chirping around your head.

n

You know it's bad when I finished this book and immediately had to Google "ending of Special Topics in Calamity Physics" AND do a deep dive into Reddit in order to understand the ending.

It was way before my time, but after finishing this book, all I could think of was the ongoing unanswered question on the old TV show Dallas:



Thank you, Chandler; I would like to know the same thing. But in my case, I would like to know WHO KILLED HANNAH AND WHY. (thank you, reddit thread, because I now somewhat vaguely understand it)

I'm getting ahead of myself.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics is Marisha Pessl's first book. After reading (and LOVING - it was one of my favorite books of 2023) Night Film, her second novel, I wanted to pick this one up. I tried to read it a couple of months ago and DNF'd it after the horribly long, boring introduction, but something (I think my love of Night Film) made me want to read it so I picked it up again. The urge to DNF was strong, but I persisted. I was sure the slow beginning would be worth it with a fantastic ending.

This book follows Blue Van Meer, a 16 year old girl who, with her widowed father, has lived basically a nomadic life moving from place to place. Her father is a college professor (adjunct?), so despite the fact that she is only 16, she has a vast understanding of classic literature, historical events, and an overall very cerebral demeanor. Their nomadic lifestyle ends Blue's senior year of high school when her father says they will live in one place for a year. She ends up absorbed into a group of the popular kids who have a close bond with their teacher, Hannah Schneider. Hannah dies by suicide, but Blue doesn't believe it's a suicide and starts her own investigation.

That is ostensibly the plot of the book.

HOWEVER. And it's a big however.

The majority of the book consists of Blue philosophizing about literally everything she comes across. The random citations at the end of her thoughts were annoying and apparently most of the works she cited (with the exception of a number of notable classic novels and a few movies) are not real? Not to mention the fact that Hannah's death doesn't happen until past page 300. Calling this a "mystery" is a pretty big stretch since the mystery elements don't come in until somewhere around the 60 percent mark. That leaves Blue a mere 200 pages to figure everything out. Usually mysteries work the opposite way: someone dies 25-50 pages into the book and the main character has the remaining 300 pages to figure out who did it, how they did it and why. I would have almost called Hannah's death a spoiler except for the fact that literally the first sentence of the first chapter is Blue saying, "Before I tell you about Hannah Schneider's death, I'll tell you about my mother's" so it's pretty obvious Hannah will die.

The whole mystery aspect was very convoluted and seemingly random events like the trip to France turned out to be more important than they seemed. The "Final Exam" section at the end was basically the author whacking the reader over the head with the fact that the book has an open ending. I don't mind an ambiguous ending. The ending of Night Film was somewhat open and we all know I loved that book. But this book was something else entirely. Can an ending be considered "open" if nothing whatsoever is explained? I wouldn't call it "open" so much as "vague beyond measure."

I'm sad. I'm sad that I trudged through a 500+ page book and only gave it a 2 star rating.

The similarities with this book and Night Film are interesting (both are about a character investigating a death ruled as a suicide, both have interactive elements - and the pictures Blue draws that appear throughout were one of my favorite things about the book, both have open endings) but Night Film does all of those things better.

All that to say: Night Film is a fantastic book and you should definitely read it. You can skip this one.

Audiobook. I listened to half of this and have decided that life's too short for the second half. The pseudo-academic tone and flat characters were not engaging in the slightest.

3.5⭐️

Blue Van Meer è un’adolescente intelligente e ben istruita, abituata a spostarsi di continuo di città in città e di scuola in scuola a causa del lavoro di suo padre, professore estremamente carismatico dalla personalità istrionica.
A causa di questi continui traslochi Blue non ha amici perciò, quando le viene proposto di entrare nell’esclusivo club dei Sangue Blu dalla professoressa fondatrice, Hannah Schneider, si lascia affascinare e trasportare.
Ognuno dei membri sembra essere circondato da un’aura di mistero e di richiamo, soprattutto Hannah, quarantenne di estrema bellezza che ha un forte ascendente su tutti loro: della sua vita non racconta mai nulla e nessuno conosce il suo passato.

Tutto scorre in modo apparentemente liscio finché non accadrà un evento che trascinerà la storia in un turbinio di congetture e di ipotesi che non riusciranno mai a trovare risposta, ma che influenzeranno per sempre la vita di Blue.
Chi è davvero Hannah? Come districare la rete di mistero che si è avvolta attorno e risolvere l’enigma in cui lei e i Sangue Blu sono caduti?

La trama che intesse la Pessl è inizialmente lenta e introduttiva, per poi accelerare e frenare bruscamente verso la fine. La scrittura è volutamente ricca di citazioni, metafore e frasi ridondanti e forzatamente erudite, come a voler disegnare una caricatura dei protagonisti.
Romanzo di formazione che sfocia nel noir fino a togliere tutte le certezze costruite dal lettore pagina dopo pagina.

This so-called novel illustrates Alexander Pope's line, "A little learning is a dangerous thing." Pessl is clearly so impressed with her own superficial knowledge--and with herself--that she is unable to refrain from including any pop-culture or literary reference that happens to pop into her immature mind. She includes three similes when one would be excessive. Then there are her metaphors. She loves metaphors! One can only assume that most of them are on the page only to give Pessl the manual exercise of typing them. They certainly do nothing to aid a reader's comprehension of her story; in fact, her metaphors are more likely to confuse than illuminate.

Equally tiresome are Pessl's parenthetical citations, many of which are bogus and lame attempts at wit, but even these are not as maddening as her penchant for using nouns as verbs. The book also is jam-packed with errors in spelling, basic grammar, and usage.

Beneath this author’s barrage of tedious attempts at stylishness lies a plot involving what might have been a fairly intriguing mystery, but she fails to resolve it in a credible, responsible way. The New York Times Book Review staff should be taken out and shot for touting this as "one of the 10 best books of the year"; it's simply impossible that 2006 could have been so desperate for good books. I'm just glad that my library's used-books store charged me only $1 for these 514 pages of time-wasting egotism. But it was a sad waste of paper too.

2.5 stars. i loved night film

this is very literary fiction perhaps too literary for my tastes.

more of a slow sizzle than slow burn very well written and clever but relative to night film it just doesn't measure up.

I only got about 20% of the way through this one. But do keep in mind that it’s a big book: over 500 pages or 21 hours of listening. I don’t like giving up on books and I’d really enjoyed her 2014 novel  Night Film so I did try to stay with it. The problem is that though there’s a relatively enticing story here, the telling is just so protracted, so tiresome that I lost the will.

It kicks off by introducing 24-year-old Blue van Meer who’d lost her mother early (car accident) and is now touring America with her father, moving from one academic outpost to the next. At the point I gave up, Blue had already flagged another death and had introduced us to the fated lady. The story was working its way – very slowly – the the point of her demise.

I think it’s the style as much as the pontification that got to me. It really is like listening to the ramblings of a twenty-something: chuntering on, using lots of words - far too many for the point being made. The whole thing is just blathering away without making any significant progress.

Some reviewers have compared this book to  The Secret History. I can see the similarities, but Donna Tartt’s book, although flawed, did grab me more and made me stay with it. This is a book that readers will either love or hate, I feel. I think I’ve nailed my colours to the mast on that one.