The End of Mr. y

This is a compendium of oddities and influences that, bizarrely, works to great effect. Imagine Woody Allen had written the screen play of The Matrix heavily influenced by The Wizard of Oz and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland just after reading Einstein's seminal 1905 paper on Special Relativity and you'll get some idea of its contents and storyline. I'm not sure if Thomas read Woody's story The Kugelmass Episode in advance of writing The End of Mr Y but there are some interesting similarities not least the fact that Thomas' heroine, PhD student, Ariel Manto, having found a rare copy of the book, The End of Mr Y, proceeds to follow instructions she finds therein that allow her to enter another dimension known as the Troposphere where she meets all kinds of weird and wonderful characters including a beneficent `rabbit god' called Apollo Smintheus. If this all sounds a bit much reserve judgement until you've tried it as it is well worth the effort. Apparently, it's been referred to as `chick lit for nerds': a better description might be a novel of ideas for slappers - get to about page 30 and you might see what I mean. For all that it is entertaining, funny, intelligent, well written, immensely engaging and beats the pants off what, laughingly, passes for literary fiction these days with the so-called literati!

If you are interested in: mind reading, mind control, academia, time travel, homeopathy, quantum physics, adultery, kinky sex, laboratory mice, the creation of gods, the fate of autistic kids in the troposphere and/or how to keep an English apartment warm. A very well-written, marvellously inventive and intelligent book about... I'm still not sure, but I loved every minute of reading it. One of the usual drawbacks of books that are as crazily inventive as this one is that the ending doesn't quite live up to the book -- never fear. The ending was a bit sad, I thought, but it fit. Very satisfying, especially if you like sci fi elements in your fiction, and if you don't, this is the place to start.

I started a review a while ago but gave up in despair. This is not an easy book to review, partly because it is not entirely a novel in the traditional sense. True, it does have several main characters, all of whom are very three (maybe four) dimensional and well developed. and I like the main character for her quirks and weaknesses. But this novel is also largely a framework for ideas and an opportunity to explore (digress into) areas of philosophy, physics, Heidegger, Derrida, Einstein, homeopathy, rare books, time travel, and plenty more. For that, I enjoyed it and let go of the need for it to fit into any particular category. There were times when I felt the author was using the excuse of a novel form to talk about something else. My only disappointment was the final passage, which I found to be an unfortunate mixture of corn and confusion. I felt the author was hard pressed to "wrap it all up" and it became muddled and forced. I think also the author was trying to fit the ending into a more traditional format that did not go well with the rest of the book. The final scene was disappointing, but see for yourself. I still liked it and would recommend it. I gave my copy away.

"Smart, stylish and dizzying... a breakneck thriller of a plot that includes collapsing buildings, renegade C.I.A. agents and debauched sex." That's what the New York Times Review of books had to say about this book. With that kind of recommendation from them, I had to give it a read and let me tell you, I was not disappointed. Ariel Manto is a graduate student in England who is doing a dissertation on Thomas Lumas, a nineteenth-century scientist who penned an impossible to find book called, "The End of Mr. Y." It seems the book is cursed and all who have read it have died shortly after. No problem for Ariel, because the book is impossible to find. Or is it? A year earlier, Professor Burlem, the professor who was supposed to me mentoring Ariel, mysteriously disappeared, but Ariel continued doggedly on, hoping that someday he will return. Then one day, she finds the next best thing to finding her missing prof, she finds the book Lumas wrote in a secondhand bookstore. If anything will help her with her dissertation, this is it. However, there is that pesky curse. It seems that Lumas, the book's author, swallowed a tincture he made up and after staring into a black dot, was whisked away to a place called the Troposphere, where he not only zipped through space, but other minds as well. Sounds a bit like LSD to me. Anyway, Ariel defies the curse, opens the book and follows in Lumas' footsteps, tincture, black dot and all, and she too crosses over into the Troposphere, where she can seek the answers to questions that bother her some, like whatever happened to Professor Burlem, are there more dimensions, are dimensions real or is it all just an hallucination. Whether illusion or real, Ariel runs afoul of some people who don't exactly want this Troposphere business getting around. They have guns and go after those who get into it. And Ariel got in. This is a mindbender of a book. A thriller that is a real class act. The story is told from Ariel's point of view and told so well, that I times I actually thought I was Ariel, that I was were she was, and that is the mark of truly outstanding fiction. If you're into mysteries, thrillers, scifi or horror than this book is for you. You won't soon be forgetting it. Brrr, it's good.

I'll be honest: I was initially drawn to this book because of the cute little mouse on the front cover. I picked it up and read the back. It said in huge letters: IF YOU KNEW THIS BOOK WAS CURSED, WOULD YOU READ IT? Intrigued, I read the rest of the blurb and discovered it was about a woman, Ariel, who read a book that was supposedly cursed and wound up lost in an alternate level of consciousness where she could read others' minds. Wow! Now I was really intrigued! As soon as I had the book in my hands, I couldn't wait to read it and find out if the book really was cursed.The book-within-a-book that Ariel reads may be cursed and it may not be, but I won't spoil it for those of you who haven't read it. However, Scarlett Thomas's novel is definetely cursed. Each page of it will literally haunt and possess you. As you read it, you will become so absorbed in it that you will lose awareness of everything else around you. You will stay up for hours after your bedtime trying to solve the many mysteries that lie within the multi-layered plots of the book. You will find yourself asking deep, profound questions, such as: Is there a God? How did the universe begin? Are there other universes out there that we aren't aware of? What are thoughts made of? Are thoughts tangible? Are we all connected somehow by the tangled web of thoughts we weave? Can we read people's minds and thoughts? Can others read our minds? What would it be like if I turned into a mouse? (I kid you not about the last one!) And when you finally go to bed, your dreams will be possessed by the labyrinths and questions of the book, and you will find yourself trying to make sense of it all. Even after you have finished the book, it will continue to haunt your mind. You will be filled with an insatiable desire to aquire all of Scarlett Thomas's other writings and read them!