A lizard from the far-future at one point observes, “all time was one instant, all space one point.”
Apart from scrambling for the dictionary more than often, this book has got me hooked! You might wonder how I like nearly every other book that I read; the thing is I really find it ill of me to not like books/certain plots for various reasons. There are some books though that I’ve had a hard time getting through, halted halfway which I don’t write about. So if I write about a book, it means I really like it and it has etched an impact on me some way or the other or I plainly enjoy reading a novel for the pure pleasure of it.
Now, enough of that explanatory overture (yep, yours truly has been listening to a lot of classical music lately). So I’m reading a book right now, by Ned Beauman – The Teleportation Accident and whilst I was on page 69 (as the odds would have it), a fanged unorthodox idea sunk its teeth into my brain; why not review the book as I read it and post it all together … chronologically?!
And that’s what I did and I apologize for that in advance.
May 2, 2018
Dear diary
My day was bad. The chapatti I had for dinner did something to my tummy and it looks like I may have to lease the lavatory on a one-day contract.
Where were we? Oh, yes; The Teleportation Accident. The plot of this book still seems unclear even though I’m on page 69! Beauman has spilt his tea all over the place. I am quite not able to pin down a genre on this book. It’s not an erotica for sure but there are more than required compositions of carnal festivities for 69 pages, it is set in 1931 and dwells deeply about Berlin but that doesn’t make this historical fiction does it, the satire is prolific but I wouldn’t go as far as shelving this under Humor and it definitely is not noir – all the lights are on.
Maybe I should get past 69. So you might wonder what got me “hooked” when the mere genre-ascertaining has been disarray for me; the vignettes, kids the vivid vignettes. Allow me the pleasure of showcasing some for you –
On being inebriated Beauman writes: It transformed him into an emotional equivalent of one of those strange Peruvian frogs with transparent skin exposing their jumpy little hearts.
On Adele Hitler’s (whom we’re yet to confirm if she is related to the Hitler) eyes: Most tender eyes that Loeser had ever seen but also the most astonishingly baroque, with each iris showing a spray of gold around the pupil like the corona around the eclipse with a dappled band of blue and green, within an outline of grey as distinct as a pencil mark and then beyond that an expanse of moist white that did not betray even the faintest red vein but sheltered at its inner corner a perfect tear duct like a tiny pink sapphire.
Update: She is not related to the Hitler.
On escalators: Never in your life will you have seen so many apparently healthy adults queuing up for the privilege of standing still.
On how the rich laugh: Nearby he heard one of those startling explosions of communal laughter that are distributed at random intervals through parties like moisture pockets in a fireplace log.
These are just a few. Now you see why I want to keep going despite the dubiety.
May 3, 2018
To put it concisely, the plot has moved from the Weimar Republic to Paris and the protagonist has switched from the German named Egon Loeser to Herbert Wolf Scramsfield, an American in Paris. I’m on the 92nd page and the plot… well, it escalated quickly. We’re in Paris, in 1934 now.
But back to the start for a bit.
In 1931, Loeser, who works at a theatre, sets a stage for a play on Lavicini (a carpenter, a set designer himself and Loeser’s apotheosis, paragon… call it what you want, he adored that guy and has done a lot of research on him). As a tribute to Lavicini, Loeser and his three other friends plan to bring out a play in a tiny Berlin theatre. That play is based on an incident wherein 1679, Lavicini builds a machine called Extraordinary Mechanism for the Almost Instantaneous Transport of Persons from Place to Place, in simple terms: a Teleportation Device. This device on its attempt at Theatre des Encornets in Paris collapses, killing 25 members of the audience and the set designer Adriano Lavicini, the machine is immediately condemned and also believed that it was possessed by some devil and thought to have had infernal features. It has so much history, darting through time carelessly but Beauman has a way through his words that makes this rapid time-travel from past to present, present to past, future to past through the present and the Section – C Grammar of the 4th standard English paper fair to middling.
But on the contrary, I think Beauman riffled through a dictionary, held a random page, closed his eyes, placed his index finger on some word and just spliced the word to the sentence he was writing. Or his vocabulary is just exemplary. The surreal plot swivels here and there aimlessly, there are so many open-ended patches but I’d read the book just for the motley of idiosyncratic, incredibly graphic phrases. The book is just so quotable that my book is almost indecipherable with all that pencil markings! And the cover is even better.
May 7, 2018
Dang it! I’m done with 76% of the book. SO MUCH HAS HAPPENED. No more in Paris either. It’s Los Angeles, baby!
(Weimar Republic (Germany) > Paris, France > LA, USA)
Gosh. There are too many characters to keep up with and then there’s the physics of time and space, all the science behind time traveling, the technical know-how of the Teleportation Device, mechanics and the engineering of set-building, infidelity of the bourgeois’ relationships, literary realism, past, present and future happening all at once. And our anti-hero protagonist is beyond knee deep in being in love with Adele Hister (now Hister from Hitler, to avoid people from misinterpreting that she’s somehow related to Hitler) and devoted rerererere-reading Midnight At The Nursing Academy, that he misses out on important, slightly-of-consequence Nazis dictatorship, the Holocaust and basically the World Wars – politics and world affairs in general mainly because he’s hungover most of the time and partly due to him shunning Politics away.
ARGH. HOW DO I EVEN BOIL THIS BOOK DOWN TO A REVIEW?
Note: Given the kind of a lazy person with way too many aiyo-amma suspirations I am, I have duly neglected my promise of chronologically reviewing this book.
May 13, 2018
Not sure if I am done with the book or if the book did me.
The ending was worth sticking to a plot that went bonkers the word it made sense it to me. It was all worth it. It was all worth it. It was all worth it.
Zeitgeisterbahnhofe (four endings)
The book comes down to four equally mind-bending endings. I am still blown away by the raw brilliance of how neither of the four endings came together like how I thought this book would gird up to the finale.
shook
rafagurrl 