I’ll be 51 this Sunday and I read two books a week. It adds up, and this is the best I’ve ever read. As it’s very far from an ordinary read , I can’t write a review as I normally would. The plot and characters are fantastic, compelling, memorable, surprising…but the book is more than anything a magic box. Trussoni also has an unsettling ability to mention everything of interest and everything that has come up lately. I thought about making a website that would emulate the ability of a pile of transparency sheets to create a composite image, and that process is mentioned. I learned about the idea of the singularity this week–the possible future time when technological growth becomes uncontrollable–and it’s there. A central theme is a kind of mythical creature I had mentioned to me recently. And the characters, and of course the author, see into the reader in other ways, with the bizarre turns in the tale perfectly allowing every nuance of the strange folks within to emerge, but also startling the consumer of this sorcery on every page. What’s the book about? Everything, but there’s a framework. A puzzle maker, who, through a brain injury, gains the remarkable ability to see “that particular kind of order that [distinguishes] a puzzle from everything else on the planet,” meets a prisoner who hands him a drawing, a puzzle he can’t even begin to unlock. It leads him to letters and a diary that describe a dangerous quest to “lift the veil between the human and the Divine and [stare] directly into the eyes of God.” There’s homework before you read this so that you can be in the right frame of mind to take in its wonder. Read Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Shaun Tan’s The Arrival, Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, Aimee Pokwatka’s Self Portrait with Nothing, and Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near. And then clear a weekend.
