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| Marisha Pessl book jacket, as mentioned below Photo: Deborah Lopez, The New York Times |
I found Marisha Pessl's Special Topics in Calamity Physics as charming and fun to read, was as impressed by her cleverness, as anyone. It was on the New York Times Ten Best Books of the Year (2006). Charming, fun, clever- but its strengths are its weaknesses too.
The book has its own charming, though slow, website:
And a movie is said to be in the works by Scott Rudin, the producer who snagged The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and produced The Social Network, The Queen etc.
I was particularly impressed by Pessl's creation of the character of the father, who came across so three-dimensional that you could assume that it must be Pessl's real father, and the story a memoir. Sometimes we love him and sometimes we are appalled, but always we are fascinated and wish we knew him. The narrator's voice is fairly distinctive also. The Hannah character wasn't too bad either. But no creation here comes even close to the father's character.
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charming "photo" (found online) of Blue van Meer, the heroine/narrator of Special Topics* |
A lot of critics were irritated by the style..
