Special Topics in Calamity Physics

In March I continued with my Charles Dickens and Edwin Drood obsession by reading Wilkie Collins The Woman in White and Matthew Pearl The Last Dickens. I also read 3 contemporary fiction novels. It has been quite a nice month with some decent reads. I had planned on reading most of these books and I rarely plan that much ahead with my reading so this was an interesting experience and I kind of liked it.

I had hoped to read 6 books this month but towards the end, I didn’t have the time to really sit down and read. So another month with 5 books. Still – I’m 3 books ahead of my reading challenge goal of 52 books so that’s really great!

Wilkie Collins: The Woman in White. A mystery involving a woman running from an insane asylum. I was so well entertained for most of this book – couldn’t put it down. 5 stars.
Marisha Pessl: Special Topics in Calamity Physics. This was supposed to be somewhat similar to Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. I think there’s potential in this book but I was not too impressed with it. 3 stars.
Jonathan Carroll: The Ghost in Love. A humorous take on what happens when people stop dying. I really liked this book – it was just too short! I’ll definitely be reading more from this author. 4 stars.
Matthew Pearl: The Last Dickens. What happened when Dickens died? Did he finish his last book or did he die in the middle? His American publisher sets out for England to find out. Some interesting things – but not as good as Dan Simmons’ Drood. 3 stars.
John Irving: The Water-Method Man. I love John Irving’s novels – this was his second and it was so interesting to see how a lot of his familiar themes are already present in this early novel. A great read – but not as good as some of his later novels. 3 stars.

I’ve read 2265 pages this month – but no e-books. The longest book was Wilkie Collins The Woman in White (672 pages) – this was also this month’s only 5 stars read.

On most of my challenges, I’m doing really well. I haven’t started working on the Haruki Murakami or Neil Gaiman challenges yet but I’ve read 10 out of 25 for my Mount TBR Reading Challenge, I’ve read 5 out of 6 chunksters for the Chunkster Challenge (as well as some extra chunksters that didn’t count). I’m also doing okay with the challenge I’ve set for myself – I’ve read 6 books out of the 25 titles I have planned to read this year and 15 out of a year goal of 52 books. My to-read shelf has 177 books on it – I’m working on getting less books on this shelf and it’s not going very quickly because I’ve bought a few books and read some books from the library, but it’s getting lower at least.

And then there’s Clarissa … Oh yeah. I will post a Clarissa post for March later but for now I’ll just say that although I started March full of enthusiasm and really looking forward to reading a lot of Clarissa, I have been struggling a lot this month. I’m not quite on track but almost and I will get there!

I haven’t all that much planned for April. I plan on reading the books mentioned in my post about my 9-11 theme (I’ve already started with Jonathan Safran Foer Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close which I love – the other two are Don DeLillo Falling Man and Amy Waldman The Submission). I’m not sure what else I’m going to read – whatever I feel like afterwards, I guess. On a somewhat book related note, I plan on watching The Hunger Games tomorrow. I’m really looking forward to that!

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So yes, I have to write a review for this book. Or well, I don’t have too but I want too. I finished it yesterday and I’m still not quite sure what I think. I think it’s an uneven book. The first 200 pages was okay – interesting, but nothing amazing. Then the next 300 pages or so was actually great. I was intrigued, enjoying myself and really getting into the story. But then the end … Hm. I’m really not sure about the ending.

I’ve read some reviews that says everything will make sense when one reads the last chapter. And well, yeah, it did explain things. But I’m just not sure it did so in a very satisfying way. I’m still wondering … Sometimes it makes a book better when the end is ambiguous, sometimes it’s just the right thing. In this book – still not sure.

This is the story of Blue and her father and the year they spent in Stockton where Blue finished high school at St. Gallway School. Blue and her father have been alone since Blue’s mother died when she was 5 years old. Since then the two of them have been traveling from place to place, never staying for long in any place. Blue’s father is a political science professor and has made quite a name for himself so he never lacks for work. They move from town to town, Blue goes to school and her father teaches. On the road, they read books, discuss them, quote movies and more. Since Blue never really make any friends, she is quite bookish and does very good in school.

But everything changes when they arrive in Stockton. Here, Blue meets a rather enigmatic and very charismatic teacher, Hannah Schneider. Hannah introduces Blue to the Bluebloods – Jade, Charles, Leulah, Nigel and Milton. This group of students keep to themselves but meet up once a week for Sunday dinners at Hannah’s. Hannah makes sure that Blue becomes one of the group even though she never really fits in. The group crashes a party at Hannah’s at one point where a man drowns in a swimming pool. And then – there’s the camping trip. Planned by Hannah who drags the Bluebloods and Blue with her, neither of whom care anything for camping.

We know from an early point – the first page – that Blue found Hannah dead about a year earlier and that she’s now looking back and trying to figure out what happened. The book reads therefore somewhat as a murder mystery. Did Hannah commit suicide? Why? The action packed chapters relating to this mystery was by far the best. The dead man in the swimming pool, Hannah’s demise, her father’s research, the death of her mother – everything come together in the theory, Blue thinks out towards the end to figure it all out.

There’s so much of the plot that I have left out because I think it will ruin the book if I start talking about these things. Some of the things Blue tells about her life before Stockton and her father’s research is extremely important – some things are not. I don’t want to spoil it for anybody by talking about any of these things.

There are enough good ideas in this to make me want to read the author’s next book when it’s published. There were parts of this that were truly genius, unforgettable scenes. My favorite one is Blue stumbling through the forest, going after the sound of what she thinks is a child swinging – loved it. I was so into this – just stumbling along with Blue, trying to figure out what the sound was.

I think there’s something in this book. I think there is something there to find. I think this book would be better on a second read. Either that, or else this novel is way too constructed. I’m still not sure. The structure of the novel is a Core Curriculum – a list of Required Reading. Each chapter is named after a famous novel with the final chapter being the final exam: ‘/…/ a professor is the only person on earth with the power to put a veritable frame around life – not the whole thing, God no, – simply a fragment of it, a small wedge. He organizes the unorganizable. /…/ You think me crazy. Consider a Kandinsky. Utterly muddled, put a frame around it, voilà – looks rather quaint above the fireplace. And so it is with the curriculum. That celestial, sweet set of instructions, culminating in the scary wonder of the Final Exam. And what is the Final Exam? A test of one’s deepest understanding of giant concepts.’ (p. 11). Now I love this image. And that’s what Blue does. She tries to frame her experiences with Hannah to make sense of them and so she uses her father’s advice and creates a Curriculum and ending her text with a Final Exam. But my problem with this is, that even though it’s a neat idea, I need it to be more. If you name each chapter after a famous work of literature, you need to do so for a reason – and the reason has to be more than your main character being really bookish. I didn’t see the connections.

And the final exam, well, that’s not Blue’s work. That’s the work of Marisha Pessl. I don’t think Blue would write that final questionnaire and that kind of ruins the whole way of organizing the book a bit. I didn’t think this way of ending the book completely works. It does give some hints at answers but I think it’s presented in the wrong way.

Another thing is, that all we have to go on in this novel, is Blue’s words and thoughts, written down about a year after the whole episode with Hannah and after Blue has assembled her theory of everything, that has happened. Can we trust Blue? Is she a reliable narrator? I’m not sure but part of the Final Exam seems to hint that she’s not. And in fact, the entire Final Exam with it’s multiple choice questions as well as the repeated mention of the ‘final examination will test your deepest understanding of giant concepts’ (p. 509) seem to mean that we, the readers, have to decide for ourselves what really happened.

This book compares rather easily to Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. A group of students, an enigmatic teacher who gathers them. An outsider enters the group. Death. In my opinion, there’s a lot of differences between the two. The Secret History is about the group of students and what happens between them where Special Topics in Calamity Physics is more about Blue, her father and Hannah – the group of students are less important and fades out of the story as it turns truly interesting. In my opinion, The Secret History is by far the better book. Better written, more interesting characters, a more compelling plot.

I want to finish this with a wonderful quote from the book, something Blue’s father says to her and that I want to say to my daughters: ‘May your studies continue to the end of your days. /…/ May you walk a lighted path. May you fight for truth – your truth, not someone else’s – and may you understand, above all things, that you are the most important concept, theory and philosophy I have ever known.’ (p. 314)