This one was rough for me! I haven't read any reviews & I'm not sure if this has been pointed out (it probably has been lol), but this one felt so similar to the secret history that it was hard for me to not spend a majority of the book comparing the two. The book felt so unnecessarily long winded and the main characters perspective was... not my favorite to put it nicely. All in all this just wasn't for me!

Blue

Blue, indiscussa protagonista di questa storia nonchè voce narrante, è un'adolescente che, dopo anni di frequentissimi traslochi, viene omaggiata dal padre, rinomato e carismatico professore universitario, di un intero anno accademico - l'ultimo prima dell'università - nello stesso luogo.

Un anno che, nonostante tutto, si prospetta uguale ai precedenti, ovvero costellato da brillanti risultati accademici ma con visibilità e vita sociale uguali a zero. Questo fino a quando Blue non viene cooptata dalla professoressa Hannah Schneider in un gruppo di adolescenti chiamati i Sangue Blu di cui si circonda per motivi non molto chiari.

Nonostante l'iniziale difficoltà ad inserirsi nel gruppo di ragazzi (brillanti nonchè strani, ognuno nella propria peculiare maniera) Blue viene presto assorbita dalle loro attività, che condivide però solo superficialmente, sentendosi spesso un'impostora. L'ambiguità di Hannah Schneider e dei suoi protetti avvolge sempre di più la protagonista, fino all'esplosione centrale che sembra far cambiare velocemente rotta al romanzo, trasformandolo in una specie di noir.

Nonostante le settecento pagine, Teoria e pratica di ogni cosa è un romanzo estremamente affascinante. L'erudizione di Blu traspira in ogni frase attraverso le innumerevoli citazioni e l'uso di frasi spesso ridondanti, troppo articolate, eccessive in tutti i sensi. Questo stile, spesso criticato, appesantisce la lettura ma è necessario per esprimere non solo l'erudizione di Blue, ma soprattutto la sua tendenza a vivere il mondo attraverso i libri. E' solo con i Sangue Ble e Hanna che Blue comincia la "pratica" del titolo.

Teoria e pratica di ogni cosa è un doloroso romanzo di formazione ma anche un noir al cardiopalma. Qualcuno ha contestato i finali un po' aperti, ma personalmente trovo che riprendere tutti i fili sarebbe stato fin troppo diligente. Il finale un po' così, invece, è più come la vita vera, vivido e disordinato.

'...la vita è "un susseguirsi di mazzate e, anche quando sei a terra, e non vedi niente perché ti colpiscono sulla parte della testa dove è racchiusa la facoltà della vista, e non respiri perché ti hanno preso a calci nello stomaco e ne hanno risentito i polmoni, e hai il naso pieno di sangue perché ti hanno tenuto fermo e riempito la faccia di pugni, ti tiri su e ti senti 'alla grande'. Addirittura meraviglioso. Perché sei vivo.". [693]

I'm really torn about this. Review to come. Review has arrived! :D
A little bit of back story: I spontaneously bought Special Topics in Calamity Physics way back in 2011 for the only reason I bought books back then: The summary on the back and the first paragraph sounded interesting. Then I read the first first few chapters, really liked them, underlined a lot of sentences, and then put the book down for some reason. Then the book stood on my shelves for a couple of years in which I bought (and read) Marisha Pessl’s other book Night Film. The length of over 700 pages was intimidating, and I knew from the first few chapters I had read that the writing style wasn’t exactly straight forward and easy to fly through.
This year my mom decided to download this book as an audiobook on her Audible account and since I’m lucky enough to use her account as well, I thought half-reading and half-listening to it would be a good idea.
I had a lot of trouble getting into the story again. What annoyed me to no end (at least throughout the first half) was Pessl's constant use of similes! These freakin' similes! What 17-year-old me back in 2011 thought sounded super intelligent and eloquent annoyed the crap out of me in 2015. Some of the examples I wrote down include: "I sounded like crumbled tin foil." / "His face didn't look more cruel than a peanut butter sandwich with the crust cut off." What. the. fuck.
The "big" mystery of the story didn’t present itself as a mystery in the beginning (at least not me) which didn't make me eager to continue at first, but I had this weird sort of faith I sometimes get while reading a mediocre book. I was sure that it would get better - and it did!
In the second half of the book the mystery grew, well, more mysterious, shit went down and I really started to enjoy it! I liked how things resolved at the end. I think some of it was really bold and all worked out for me! In the back of the book is a sort of "quiz“ about the story and its characters and it fit the tone of the book really well and wrapped it all up nicely!
However, my favorite thing about this book was definitely Blue’s character development. I can't go into detail about this because of spoilers, but while I found her slightly annoying at the beginning I loved her even more towards the end! It's a really great coming-of-age story in that sense.
So, yeah. Even after typing this review, I'm still not 100% sure how to feel about Special Topics in Calamity Physics. I guess that if the premise sounds interesting to you and you're not too intimidated by the size of it, give this book a try! (And play "Count the similes!" with your friends where you have to count all of the similes in a chapter and whoever finds the most wins! Haha.)

Ugh, what a train-wreck of a book. A group of cool and aloof kids and their charismatic teacher, a murder, lots of literature references... does it sound familiar? I LOVED The secret history, this is like a cheaper YA carbon-copy with tacky drawings.

DNF at p. 130

So, this is going to be my third "DNF" this year... And you know what? I'm not going to feel bad anymore because life is too short to force your way through poorly-written books. But I am pretty sad because I really wanted to love this one.

Look, Night Film is one of my all-time favorite books - I adore everything about it. Now, when it came to Neverworld Wake - it really didn't work for me, but I decided to write it off as a "YA thing", and hoped for the best with Special Topics in Calamity Physics. The biggest problem here, which made it unreadable for me, is how absurdly over-written this is. Seriously, if you want a good example of what over-written looks like, read a few pages of this novel. I made it through about 130 pages and between the personality of the lead character and the writing style I realized that I just couldn't care less about what happens in this book. Here are some examples:

n  "She stepped onto our porch like an astronaut stepping on the moon."n  
n  
n  "As he scrutinized the cartons on the shelves like a scientist engaged in creating an accurate DNA profile from a hair root, I became aware of a woman standing at the far end of the aisle."n  
n  
n  "Heads were turned toward me like a troop of Seljuk Turks noticing a lone, unwitting Christian taking a shortcut through their camp on his way to Jerusalem."n  
n  
n  "Students observed them with wonder, like they were fast-sprouting pinto beans in a clammy covered aquarium. Teachers —not all, but some—stayed awake all night hating them, because of their weird grown-up youth, which was like gardenias blooming in January, and their beauty, which was both stunning and sad as racehorses, and their love everyone except them knew wouldn't last."n  
n

You might say, what's wrong with a few descriptions? Listen, I'm all for creative comparisons, but this is how EVERYTHING in this book is. Everything is "like" something else. It's present multiple times on every single page, and often more than once in a single paragraph. I swear, this book would be half its length if it wasn't over-written like this. I mean, I get it, the protagonist is highly educated, and she's the one telling the story, but this is going way overboard.

I don't have much else to say about this other than, as far as I've read, the characters really didn't pique my interested, but then again, everything was getting lost behind this writing style. No rating, but I definitely wouldn't recommend this novel.

FINAL EXAM -- You might first review my ongoing commentary as I digested this oleose turd.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics is

(a) a bullshit patty between two slices of lies
(b) a ghastly spasm of false erudition and pretension to knowledge
(c) nothing to do with physics whatsoever, and indeed infuriating in its suggestion that someone who hasn't even taken calculus is "writing essays on String Theory" (capitalization not, I assure you, mine), and indeed that AP Physics in either its Classical Dynamics or Electromagnetics formats has anything to do with the oft-referenced Special Theory of Relativity (also, the line "like studying quarks and quantum mechanics at the same time" -- nicely alliterative, but HOW THE FUCK WOULD YOU STUDY QUARKS WITHOUT QUANTUM MECHANICS)
(d) Christ, a waste of my time (see Visual Aid 1.0 ("Results", Electron Band Structure in Germanium, My Ass, Lucas Kovar, 2001, Annals of Improbable Research))
(e) all of the above

oh yeah, and gareth killed hannah. i'm going to go drink the bathroom cleaner until i hurl chunks of my spleen. fuck you, marisha pessl.

----
GT Bookstore, 2008-08-26, impulse acquisition

Visionario, ironico, intelligentissimo e arguto. Peccato si perda un po' nel finale, lasciando a mio avviso troppi punti di domanda.

Bloated and bloviating, despite its 500+ page runtime, Special Topics in Calamity Physics is a colossal failure of a book. You would think that at one point or another (its sheer length provided ample opportunity) this ‘novel’ would at least, however briefly, be able to convey some sort of meaning, or at least be able to elicit some sort of meaningful emotional response (beyond irritation) in the reader...but Special Topics in Calamity Physics failed to do so. That this book was written by the same person as Night Film (which i loved) makes it all the more boggling yet somehow despite its huge word count, Special Topics in Calamity Physics is Special Topics in Calamity Physics doesn’t even manage to deliver on style, as the academic setting and elements are entirely derivative of the academia genre. The novel is bogged down by verbose and densely self-referential language that is pretentiously self-indulgent and for all its aspirations of cleverness and uniqueness is lamentably lacklustre. It took me 3 months to bring myself to finish it, having come across several reviewers that made it seem like the latter half of the book would deliver on the mystery and the drama that was woefully absent in the former. But turns out they lied, Godot is a no-show.

Oozing with unearned self-satisfaction, Special Topics in Calamity Physics is the type of book that once completed makes me wonder: What was the point in any of it? I don’t always seek ‘meaningful’ books but at least they should provide some sort of diversion. This book was the opposite of that. Reading felt like a chore, and maybe the only reason why I persevered in reading it is that I have masochistic tendencies. But jokes aside, this book was a waste of my time. Why does this exist? How is this a book?

The novel supposedly has a plot that goes something along the lines of: precocious Blue grows up all over the U.S. due to her father’s job. An obnoxious narcissistic professor, her father has very much informed and shaped her education, so that by her final year of high school Blue, unlike her peers, is endowed with vast literary, philosophical, scientific, and historical knowledge. Her father’s latest placement sees them taking residence in North Carolina where Blue is enrolled in the elite St. Gallway School. Of course, this being an academia novel, Blue begins spending her time with a clique of students who have been handpicked by the supposedly intriguing Hannah Schneider, a teacher at their school.

There is little if any character interaction so most of the novel consists of Blue’s gratingly self-congratulatory internal monologue which is mostly made of real and made-up references to real-life individuals, books, films, and so forth. There is an abundance of 'quirky' asides, to the point where we have asides within asides. Their purported quirkiness falls short of genuine wit. Footnotes also litter our girl's narration, but these too add little if anything to the overall narration, and they merely seem like a gimmick, an unnecessary way of underlining how witty and bright Blue is.
Everything and anything is described in this densely turgid language. This reliance on bombastic metaphors and labored asides weigh down the text of the novel. Getting through Blue’s narration was akin to wading through a quagmire made up of this pompously high-register yet ultimately empty language that achieves nothing when it comes to conveying the story’s atmosphere or the characters’ personalities.

No one is interesting and the characters who get the most spoken lines, Blue’s father, and this annoying girl from the clique, are dull. No one is funny, clever, or fascinating. Blue is the worst offender. I read an interview where the author says that this dissonance between Blue’s internal and external self is intentional, but that means fuck all when in both instances she’s a one-note bore. No, she is not funny or clever. Her supposedly intricately Dickensian internal world is shallow. Her verbosity did not make her into a compelling or intelligent character. And this is coming from someone who can put up with a lot of navel-gazing and books that are very much vibes over plot. But here the vibes are stodgy, and the navel-gazing reveals nothing about Blue’s ‘rich’ interiority. I wasn’t charmed nor outraged by any of the characters, finding their passive presence in the story as annoying as a buzzing mosquito.

The lofty and pretentiously self-referential prose, the puerile characters, the shallow exploration of any and all topics touched upon by the narrative, the bathetic 'mystery', the derivative nature of it all made Special Topics in Calamity Physics into a tortuously overwritten novel that seems to operate under the belief that it is doing so much while in actuality doing little if anything at all.

It was a painfully cliché yet drawn-out affair led by an infuriating main character whose convoluted narration incurred the risk of triggering dissociative states. I bought a copy of this book soon after reading Pessl's Night Film but I kept putting off reading it as I was 'saving' it for later...and I shouldn't have bothered really. Special Topics in Calamity Physics was such a let-down I have a hard time reconciling it with the author behind Night Film. If this book is on your radar, I recommend you proceed with caution. What you get in those first chapters will keep on happening, ad nauseam.

I liked this book a lot. Ms. Pessl has a very unique voice. I suspect she is much like the central character Blue, erudite and very well read. Based on this novel and her second Night Film, I think she would be a fascinating dinner companion. Her writing style is however not for everyone. Throughout Topics Blue expresses herself using footnoted metaphors referencing obscure texts. I found this style to be interesting, entertaining and a good fit for Blue's character, but over time it does wear, suggesting an author trying too hard to show off her cleverness.

The first two-thirds of Topics reads as a coming of age story of self discovery as the intellectual and aloof Blue is drawn to the cipher of teacher Hannah Schneider and injected into the high school clique of the Bluebloods. Had Topics held to this story line, developed the Bluebloods and revealed a less imaginative back story for Hannah Schneider I think it would have been a better novel. The latter third devolves into a very contrived and rather silly murder mystery. A poor choice. A smart author like Ms. Pessl should have known and adhered to Occam's Razor: The simplest solution is usually best.

It is interesting to contrast this book with Donna Tartt's The Secret History and Tana French's The Likeness. Both feature an intelligent outsider brought into a clique-ish group of friends with unclear histories and hidden agendas. The main characters in The Secret History and The Likeness like Blue in Topics learn about themselves by uncovering these mysteries. Tartt's novel is like Pessl's very literary. French's is more a straight up mystery. Both are I believe more successful because Tartt and French fully develop all their characters. Pessl develops a compelling Blue but leaves many of her other characters including the key Bluebloods as sketches. Their contribution to Blue's development and the story as a whole is thus less clear.

On my buy, borrow it, skip it scale, Topics is a buy for Ms. Pessl's obvious talent and unique voice. Worth reading again despite the flaws.

Pessl's writing is smart and engaging, and I liked (at least in theory) the idea of the book being laid out as a course syllabus. However, I do bring a lot of bias to the prep school novel, and personally I'm bored of quirky (yet flawed!) groups of immediate friends. Some of the writing came off as overkill - too zany, too much - but it was nevertheless a compelling read. My other complaint is that I got far more of a sense for Blue's father (her descriptions dragged on and on, to the point where I wanted, like the Bluebloods, to tell her to shut up about him already). The end of the novel does hinge on his character, but I would have liked to get to know Blue without the ever-present specter of her father.

On that note: sometimes I wonder if authors who retroactively write about high school actually remember what high school was like. Perhaps I'm more ruffled than most because I'm so recently out of high school? The only thing that rang true about Blue's experience (at least for me) was the interaction between Blue and Milton.

There’s a special cold black place in my heart for writers under thirty who come out of nowhere with a best-selling much-praised first novel for which they receive huge advances and instant fame. The feeling is called jealousy - deep, shoulda-been-me jealousy that clouds my ability to judge the book itself.

Which brings us to Marisha Pessl and Special Topics in Calamity Physics. Every big review I read of it was glowing and every writer under thirty I talked to said it was a piece of steaming shit (but that I should totally read the novel they’re working on). Turns out that my opinion falls somewhere squarely in the middle.

The parts of the book that failed were the overly-quirky bits and the gimmicky bits. Although the narrator is characterized as smart and scholarly, much of the book is over-written, especially during slow periods. What do I mean by over-written? Describing a pair of boots as being “the shape of Italy” or someone’s face being shaped like “a box of Valentines Day candy.” Say the boots were shaped like boots! Say the woman had a heart-shaped face!

Pessl leans hard on the simile and the metaphor in this book, many times at the expense of simple, straightforward description. By having a complex, intelligent narrator, she’s trying to say, “I’m doing it on purpose!” but it still seems indulgent and silly and, ultimately, keeps us holding her world at arm’s length.

Pessl also struggles with dialogue and realistic characters - often I found myself thinking, that high school student would never say that or that gas station attendant would never say that. All of the characters tended to sound the same and think the same. Sure, if it was a high school student, Pessl would add some “likes” and a reference to J-Lo, but mostly, the person would sound like the voice of the narrator, a voice which I am guessing is the voice of Pessl herself.

But there is some beautiful writing in the book. Entire chapters were - I’ll say it - riveting. Without exception, the riveting chapters were the chapters with a lot of action in them - chapters where it felt like Pessl forgot that she was a writer trying to impress people with her first novel. In these chapters boots were boot-shaped, the language was natural, and the characters got to act like themselves.

These good chapters led me to the conclusion that Pessl’s problem might be discipline. She doesn’t know when to cut out the cute or overly-wrought stuff yet. The Writing Buddha says, kill your children and Pessl, time and again, couldn’t manage to do that. The result is a book filled with things that made the author smile, dalliances, and clever asides that don’t do much except make the book longer. I suspect she also lacked an editor who could kill those children for her.

The plot was ‘aight. It was a pretty basic murder mystery formula and I guessed the end 150 pages before the end happened even though I’m not good at guessing endings. It would have been much better and much more fast-moving if, again, someone - author or editor - had cut it down to a more manageable length.

Where does that leave us? I think Pessl’s got some talent. I think that, for a first novel, this was an achievement. On the other hand, she’s got a ways to go and I hope all of the praise does not set her more firmly in some of her ways. Talent is something you’re born with and being born with talent is easy. Now she’s got some hard work ahead of her - about learning when to hold back and about learning about the human condition outside of her own privileged experiences.

Special Topics... has certainly stirred the passions of readers and critics...especially those who love-to-hate first novels by young, successful authors. At the sight of Marisha Pessl's author photo -- lovely, unsmiling introspective waif -- I had to hold down my hate reflex with both arms, both legs, and my forehead. Yet twenty pages later, any evidence of hate (or even a struggle) was gone. I was captivated.

Blue Van Meer lost her mother at a very young age and now hops around the country with her uber-academic, Clooney-esque father, a political science professor. They decide to spend her senior year of high school in one place -- Stockton, NC -- where Blue attends a prestigious private school and attracts the interest of Hannah Schneider, a beautiful and mysterious film studies teacher who mentors an exclusive clique of students, the Bluebloods. The closer our heroine gets to this group and to Hannah, and the more she uncovers about a series of mysterious deaths, the more she discovers about her own past. The mystery made my heart pound and my inner teenager recall the taste of liquor mixed with lip balm. Pessl reveals -- subtlely but powerfully -- that difference between how teenagers see their lives (a whirlwind of importance, majesty, and despair) and the reality of them. Blue is so smart and well-read, yet she's also believably naive, self-critical, self-aggrandizing. I also love how Pessl describes the relationship between Blue and her father. It's hard to write father-daughter stuff in a way that isn't cheesy or disturbing, but this works. I do have some issues with the rendering of Hannah and the Bluebloods...I wanted to know more about them and their relationships with Blue but wound up just thinking rather poorly of them--which was disappointing. And it's weird that someone named Blue would be in a clique called the Bluebloods. (Excuse me while I put on some Joni Mitchell.)

The way this book is written is noteworthy, but style and form illuminate rather than eclipse the story. Special Topics... is organized like a college syllabus for a lit course; each chapter is named after a novel that is at least loosely thematically related (Wuthering Heights, Women in Love, and so forth) to its contents, and throughout, no source is left uncited. Well beyond its ToC, the book pokes fun at academia and living too much in books/films/etc., but it does so with such joy...the cited quotations bloom from, rather than merely garnish, the text. They also show what a life of reading gives us...what a gift it can be. I was reminded of the debate in History Boys about using quotations as little showy flourishes vs. using them to really engage with an issue. Pessl does both, and she pokes fun at the former while showing the limitations even of the latter. And I must say that I love the voluptuous vocabulary of this book, its brimming wit and beauty; it feels just right for these characters and this story.

Special Topics is not a perfect book, and there were certainly moments when I rolled my eyes (but I imagine that Pessl will roll hers too, or is already rolling them, as she ages gracefully into an even better writer) at the grandiosity of it all. But I'm grateful that people are willing to go there, to write like this and feel like this and create a world and a character I wanted to stay with for much, much longer. "Spare" writing has its place, but so does the lush. I applaud it.