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Book Reviewed by:A darkly hilarious coming-of-age novel and a richly plotted suspense tale told through the distinctive voice of its heroine, Blue van Meer.
This mesmerizing debut, uncannily uniting the trials of a postmodern upbringing with a murder mystery, heralds the arrival of a vibrant new voice in literary fiction
Special Topics in Calamity Physics is a darkly hilarious coming-of-age novel and a richly plotted suspense tale told through the distinctive voice of its heroine, Blue van Meer. After a childhood moving from one academic outpost to another with her father (a man prone to aphorisms and meteoric affairs), Blue is clever, deadpan, and possessed of a vast lexicon of literary, political, philosophical, and scientific knowledge—and is quite the cineaste to boot. In her final year of high school at the elite (and unusual) St. Gallway School in Stockton, North Carolina, Blue falls in with a charismatic group of friends and their captivating teacher, Hannah Schneider. But when the drowning of one of Hannah's friends and the shocking death of Hannah herself lead to a confluence of mysteries, Blue is left to make sense of it all with only her gimlet-eyed instincts and cultural references to guide—or misguide—her.
Structured around a syllabus for a Great Works of Literature class and containing ironic visual aids (drawn by the author), Pessl's debut novel is complex yet compelling, erudite yet accessible. It combines the suspense of Hitchcock, the self-parody of Dave Eggers, and the storytelling gifts of Donna Tartt with a dazzling intelligence and wit entirely Pessl's own.
Excerpt
Special Topics in Calamity Physics
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 over to her, turn her around and see the Look of Bitter
Longing on her face. Only Dad never turned her around to see the Bitter Longing.
Instead, he stared at her back as if it was an abstract painting. Then he went
into the kitchen for a glass of bourbon. There was Connie Madison Parker, whose
perfume hung in the air like a battered piñata. There was Zula Pierce of Okush,
New Mexico, a black woman who was taller than he was, so whenever Dad kissed her
she had to bend down as if peeking ...
The novelty of the endless literary annotations, a few genuine but mostly fake, wore thin early on. What had more staying power were Pessl's entertaining turns of phrase, such as the police officer who saturated himself in Paul Revere-like cologne which "rode far ahead of him, alerting all of his impending arrival"...continued
Full Review
(553 words)
(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
In person
Marisha is
described as
straightforward
and
unpretentious".
A close friend
writes that
"she's not this
person who
speaks above
peoples' heads".
Her husband
describes her as
"perhaps the
most driven
person, the most
goal-orientated
person, when it
came to her
novel, that I
have ever met."
When asked why
she ...
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