Pfitz

I do not like labels, especially labels like 'post modern'. A good work of fiction survives without labels, maybe even in spite of labels. This is not a book which follows traditional patterns, characters, events, relationships, beginnings-middles-ends. Maps and cities and people are drawn, built and destroyed, and not necessarily in that order. You read it and you get a sense of wonder, a feeling that somehow, by having read this book, you are a little different, that you are not you, the you that you thought you were. and it is great to feel that way. I know that there will not be rhinoceri or the peddler of the colonel's photographs (Ionesco)in Andrew Crumey's cities or novels, but I will observe them peeking around corners anyway.

Andrew Crumey is a young Scottish novelist more interested in inheriting the mantel of Barthelme, Borges and Calvino than the arid workaday mentality of most British and American novelists.This novel bristles with ideas, the inhabitants of a kingdom set to work populating a fictitious city. The work on the city is based on a model from Diderot and Dalambert's Encyclopaedia and is divided into Memory, Reason, and Imagination.There are interlinking storylines and the novel is part love story, part thriller, part comedy, part philosophical investigation.As you can see from the other reviews this novel will polarise opinion. This is a novel that requires you to think. The reader has to play a role in the story. You can not let this novel wash over you, although its length and the beauty of the writing style give you a novel that can be eaten quickly, but you should digest at leisure. To say that this novel encourages you to think may give a misleading impression. It is not an arid dry purely philosophical work. This novel, indeed all of Crumey's fiction, bears comparison with writers such as Borges, Calvino, Tadeusz Konwicki, and Galli. It is as playful as the works of each of these writers, as stimulating, and as enjoyable.It is a work in the modern European style, and harks back to the European novel writing of the eighteenth century.Enjoy...

What a joy to read a book that's truly unusual in concept. The author blurs the lines between reality and fiction until the reader forgets where the lines were drawn. Fascinating, interesting, and fun.

This book cleverly captures the spirit of the 18th century while being very modern in concept. In part it's an update of Jacques The Fatalist by Denis Diderot, which I read for a French Lit course. Like Diderot's book, Pfitz is about a master and servant, full of philosophy and erudite humour. But Crumey's book is no pastiche - he subverts Diderot's idea, adding hints of ETA Hoffman, Goethe and heaven knows what else. An amazing achievement to pack so much into a short and ver funny book. Borgesian? This is nothing like him. It's a highly original book and recommended reading for people who like to have their imagination stretched a little - actually, quite a bit.

I work in a bookstore and I was lucky enough to get an advanced copy of this book to read. This book was an amazing look at the construction of a fictional city with inhabitants and maps, etc. All the people in a real life kingdom have been chraged by their prince to create the city of Rreinstadt. The kingdom is divided up into departments. Certain people are in charge of creating the people (the Biography department), the city (the Cartography department), and the writing created if any of the "inhabitants" turn out to be writers (the Authorship department). The book centers around a "person" who suddenly appears on a map, but the Biography department has no record of him. As a cartographer starts to look deeper into this unknown creation, he starts to realize that someone in the real world doesn't want him finding out the truth. This amazingly intricate and compelling book was a joy to read