This story for young children is deceptively simple, offering moral guidance and emotional intelligence without being preachy. I also enjoyed the illuThis story for young children is deceptively simple, offering moral guidance and emotional intelligence without being preachy. I also enjoyed the illustrations.
Bailey has said something horrible to her best friend Nia (we never learn what, leaving space for the reader's imagination) and now she just can't seem to apologize. Building a time machine to go back to just before she said The Thing seems the only way out of her misery ... unless, maybe, there is another solution?
I read a digital advanced reader's copy courtesy of the publisher. Thank you for this delightful read, Pauline, Melquea and Cardinal Rule Press!...more
**spoiler alert** A novel with an ingenious structure that addresses some questions close to my heart: the philosophical implications raised by time t**spoiler alert** A novel with an ingenious structure that addresses some questions close to my heart: the philosophical implications raised by time travel, and the idea that we might be living in a simulation.
In true confession time, I've been struggling for a while now to write a novel involving these themes, and at many points have felt that I had a story too crazy to properly tell. That I was like a small dog who'd picked up a big, juicy bone that was too delicious to put down, yet too big to carry in my jaws. So when I learned what ESJM's latest novel was about, I was on fire to see how she, a person taken seriously by the literary establishment, managed it. This review is not about me, but it seems only honest to state this upfront. Though I feared being anticipated, I now realize that is absurd. There are no truly original ideas; the execution is all.
What I especially liked about this book was how enjoyable the writing is. ESJM is masterful at creating an atmosphere that feels at once ominous and nostalgic; this was also a hallmark of Station Eleven and something that immediately draws the reader in, makes the story go down easy. The structure is clever, recalling the one that David Mitchell made famous in Cloud Atlas, although the books are otherwise quite different.
My theory that all novels are in part a comment on their own creation got a huge workout in this story, with the section about an author on a wearisomely long book tour. Her novel is about a pandemic; there is about to be a pandemic. The author is both grateful for her good fortune in writing a book that is so successful, and very tired of saying the same things over and over while enduring rude and misogynist remarks from clueless readers and others. She enjoys the moments of solitude yet misses her family dreadfully. When the time traveler finally catches up with her (she was also a witness to the anomaly, and included a description of it in her novel) to ask if the incident in the novel was inspired by experience, she warily says, I don't do autofiction. Which was hilariously meta! Well played, ESJM!
The science of time travel is handled with a hand-wave, in my view really the only way one can handle it. That the time travelers must spend a lot of time preparing and studying before they go also is something I'm totally on board with. I felt at certain moments that the logic of the story and the logic of time travel were in conflict, which is a constant risk in stories involving time travel.
For instance: we readers learn of the second witnessing of the anomaly in a far different way than we learn about the first one. In the first, we are in the forest with a man who sees it. In the second, as part of a musical performance, we are watching a video a different person now dead made years earlier. This is a clever story-telling device because the two incidents are essentially identical, yet they appear to the reader quite different, and it allows a bunch of other things to be also introduced: the audience member who learns this way that her friend (the maker of the video) is dead, a mysterious stranger who appears and also starts asking questions about the incident; the cryptic but foreshadowy conversation they have.
But later, when I learned that the mysterious stranger was, as suspected, a time traveler from the future, I felt a bit cheated by this part. He didn't have to interview the dead woman's brother about the video! He's a time traveler; he could go to any point in time, directly interviewing the woman herself. And in fact, later in the book, he does. So why bother with the concert? The story needed it; the time traveler did not.
Likewise, later in the book, the time traveler is punished for his transgressions by being framed for a crime hundreds of years in the past from his own time and sent to prison for life. An ingenious punishment! But then, after decades in prison, he is rescued by his clever, time-traveling sister, who swoops in to carry him off to a spacetime location where he can evade the authorities. But again, the sister is a time traveler; she can land at any point. She even apologizes for not coming sooner, though never explains why. But what possible explanation could she have given? There is none that makes sense in the logic of how the story makes time travel work. The story needed him to not be rescued too soon.
I was partly satisfied with the resolution. I had suspected that the logic of the story demanded that the time traveler be the cause of the same anomaly he was sent to investigate, and that answer somehow involved the violin player in the airship terminal. I was pleased to be right about this, though I failed to guess exactly how he caused it. But I remain perplexed why and how the forest became part of the anomaly. Why that particular place and not somewhere else? What did it have to do with the airship terminal, really?
I was also very curious about how ESJM would handle the resolution of the simulation issue. Once the question had been asked in the story, it was obvious that they had to be living in a simulation; it's like Chekhov's gun on the mantel. But what would be the narrative implications of this? Once you find out, what do you do? What logically follows? The answer was both factually realistic and a bit of a letdown, narratively. Because that's the thing the time traveler has been sent to find out -- the mandarins at the Time Center seem strangely worried about something that should have already occurred to people who can manage time travel. And he does find out, and no one cares, so you have to file that one under shameless MacGuffin....more
I read this book because it was mentioned in Parallel Worlds, a mind-bending book about physics I have been slowly listening to for, oh, about an eon I read this book because it was mentioned in Parallel Worlds, a mind-bending book about physics I have been slowly listening to for, oh, about an eon now. Although Eon contained many interesting ideas and I am not sorry I read it, I don't think I'll be reading the remainder of the trilogy.
Ideally fiction can be a more entertaining way to learn things than nonfiction. This is often true of historical novels, for instance, or stories set in countries one has never traveled to and probably won't. But a story that entertains and also teaches you about arcane notions in physics and astronomy like string theory, the multiverse and black holes may be too much to hope for. I was intrigued by Bear's vision of the future, but also confused by many things and often overwhelmed by detailed descriptions of things too strange for me to picture at all.
There are a huge number of characters and many of them feel somewhat indistinguishable -- but then, the requirements of the story sort of demand this wide focus and large canvas.
I was also struck by what a flavor of the past this book has, despite its interest in the future. The way women are portrayed, for instance, or Russians. It did not make me cringe, although more sensitive readers might cringe. It was more nostalgic than offensive....more
I thought I had written a review of this book already, but apparently not. That fits. I think I first downloaded this audiobook in January and I kept I thought I had written a review of this book already, but apparently not. That fits. I think I first downloaded this audiobook in January and I kept renewing it, because I could (no one else had requested it) and I could neither finish nor abandon it. Finally I finished, or mostly (accidentally skipping an unknown portion of the next-to-last chapter and unable to find my place again).
It is interesting and at places extremely thought-provoking. Yet I must confess that string theory and some of the other ideas described in this book are extremely hard to visualize or imagine. To the extent that I understand them a little better than I did is a win. Or must be claimed as so....more
Recently I was seized by the desire to reread this book, which I read perhaps 10 years ago, maybe more. It is just as delightful and clever and movingRecently I was seized by the desire to reread this book, which I read perhaps 10 years ago, maybe more. It is just as delightful and clever and moving as I remembered. Though this time I had a better idea of how she was accomplishing the magic she weaves here, in part because I remembered vaguely what was coming and in part because I am more in the habit of reading like a writer.
Also interesting to see what I remembered perfectly and what I had perfectly forgotten. I had forgotten how much of the book was set in 2050s, the era that had sent Kivrin back in time, for instance.
In the 2050s part there is a great deal of setting up of dominoes in the first half -- we meet a ton of people whose plot function seems unclear, there are a lot of complications and running around frantically and unsuccessful efforts to make phone calls. (Connie Willis foresees a pandemic in this early 1990s book, and also Brexit, so perhaps we should give her a pass for failing to also foresee cell phones.) 1348 is also action-packed though somewhat more focused. But once she has the Rube Goldberg machine that is this plot all in place, wow. It picks up speed at an amazing place, something you don't want to put down, with why all these random people had to be in the story becoming blindingly clear....more
**spoiler alert** Imaginative and original. I loved how this took the simple structure of a thriller -- someone accidentally witnesses a crime, and is**spoiler alert** Imaginative and original. I loved how this took the simple structure of a thriller -- someone accidentally witnesses a crime, and is being pursued by people trying to kill them -- and stretched it into both a fascinating yarn about imagined possible futures and a sly critique of our current era.
Many aspects of the more distant future envisioned here reminded me of how I imagined the future world of my own novel to be, though Mr. Gibson is a master world-builder that puts my slapdash efforts to shame. I particularly admired how skillfully he makes exposition suspenseful and resists the temptation to jump in and over-explain. Particularly in the beginning, this can make for challenging reading, as you work hard to understand what is going on, but the effort is rewarded.
Another thing he does very well is the alternating points of view -- Flynne and Wilf are both in the third person, but events are filtered through their consciousness in a very interesting way. So when Wilf, for instance, first travels virtually to Flynne's timeline, he's seeing commmonplace things from roughly our era with a futuristic eye, finding them strange and quaint, even enchanting: A screen door. Piles of clothing and books in Flynne's bedroom.
Many books about the future struggle with this aspect, in my view. Like "New York 2140," which seemed pretty much like New York 2020, except everything was under water and people travelled by boat, or "American War," which took lots of unpleasant things from the current world -- refugee crises, suicide bombers, etc -- and put them in the American South. Though "The Peripheral" also starts with things in the world that we already have, like drones, clones, 3-D printing, AI, kleptocratic Russians in London, reality TV, it pushes them way farther, in directions at once logical and highly creative....more
I'm always interested in seeing how other writers handle the subject of time travel, particularly when, as in this case, it's classed as legitimate liI'm always interested in seeing how other writers handle the subject of time travel, particularly when, as in this case, it's classed as legitimate literary fiction and not relegated to the genre pigeonhole.
I finished this book this morning and I still honestly can't decide what to think about it. It's clever. It doesn't fit into any of my known category of books, at least not any I can think of at this moment.
The author's solution to the problem of time travel not being possible according to the laws of physics as we know them is innovative. The descriptions of time travel are on the high plane of abstraction; they cannot be pictured and are not intended to be pictured. Lots of scientific and mathematical terms, some real, are thrown in, but there's no effort to persuade the reader that any of this could happen, in some alternate realm. It is cartoonishly and unapologetically metafictional.
Which is not a bad thing, just unusual and maybe a bit distancing. Really, the book is not "about" time travel at all except in so far as it is a metaphor for the human condition. Which time travel novels kind of always are, now that I think about it. It's just that this one makes its subtext so very evident.
Really the book is "about" the narrator's search for his father, which is both a metaphorical and a literal search, and narrator and author seem to conflate in a fashion that you see a lot these days in literary fiction, because it is also "about" writing a book that is the book you hold in your hand. It struck me at one point this might even be simply autofiction, with a science fiction skin. Which is not also not a bad thing, necessarily, except it does seem to end up being a book that loops upon itself.
Which makes sense, since it is about a time loop!
Ingenuous yet it somehow left me cold, which says as much about me as about the book.
I often find short story collections jarring because I get so immersed in one story, then it ends, and I am yanked into anotheEnjoyed this one a lot!
I often find short story collections jarring because I get so immersed in one story, then it ends, and I am yanked into another. I tend to avoid them for that reason, in fact. This book I deliberately read slowly, sometimes pausing days between a story to turn it over in my mind. The ideas they explore are interesting, but it's the emotional heft the author brings to the ideas that really made this work so moving and memorable for me.
They were mostly about things I think about a lot: time travel, multiple worlds, the vagaries of memory, the effects of technology on our sense of ourselves. There wasn't a bad story in the bunch, though some were more affecting than others. I thought "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate," time travel with a sort of Arabian Nights vibe, was especially clever and satisfying.
In some ways I think the paradoxes posed by science fiction are more effectively explored in shorter fiction, where the characters are kind of sketchy but the situation can shine forth clearly....more
Jane Austen, jilted by a would-be suitor at the age of 28 and in search of true love, time-travels with the help of a mysterious witch from 1803 to 20Jane Austen, jilted by a would-be suitor at the age of 28 and in search of true love, time-travels with the help of a mysterious witch from 1803 to 2020, where she meets up with Sophia, a movie star who's approaching the end of her shelf life as a beauty (I think she is 37), losing her husband to a younger actress while playing Mrs. Allen to the younger actress's Catherine in an adaptation of Northanger Abbey being shot, naturally, in Bath. Sophia has a brother who's working as an extra on the set, and when we learn his name is Frederick Wentworth, it's pretty clear where this might be going. But when Jane and Fred start to fall in love, Austen's books begin to crumble into dust, to disappear from not only libraries and bookshelves, but from the memory of librarians and booksellers. The only people immune to this loss, apparently, are those who have met Jane Austen in person in 2020: Sophia, Fred, and a certain helpful librarian. The books are vanishing because a Jane Austen who lived happily in the 21st century obviously never wrote them.
What worked best for me here was the wonder and terror Jane Austen feels on finding herself in 2020 Bath (and the way that comments on our time) as well as some of the fun we have along the way. For example, how to overcome the hurdle of making people in 2020 believe you are truly from 1803 and not a lunatic, how to find safety in this strange world? Givney cleverly has Sophia, who's at such a dangerous and vulnerable moment in her career, believe she is being tricked for some kind of reality show, that this "Jane Austen" has been sent to make her look foolish and everything is secretly being filmed. She resolves to thwart the people behind this scheme by acting as if everything is perfectly normal. Thus she spends enough time in the company of Jane Austen that by the time she realizes what's actually happening, she is prepared to believe it (though not, obviously, without difficulty).
Jane Austen, as we might expect, is quick-witted and fascinated by the world she finds herself in. Watching her learn about electricity, self-inking pens, supermarkets, the shockingly low prices of sugar, gay marriage and much more is one of the chief pleasures of this amusing book. Although my favorite moment may be when she finds herself reading her own work. "Pride and Prejudice" she recognizes, of course, but "Mansfield Park" is completely new to her.
This was a very interesting read for me because it uses the improbable device of time travel to raise many of the same questions I asked myself in the writing of my own novel The Jane Austen Project, questions somehow connected to Austen's immortality as a writer. What is it about her work that endures, when her world and ours are so different in many profound ways? Why do we feel such a kinship with this long-dead woman, why do we want to claim her?
It's also written in a witty style that channels Austen's own, though the ultimate question it poses is very different from those in her novels. It seems to be asking, is it better to be a great artist or to be personally happy? But this offended me, because it seems to me a false dilemma and moreover one that would never be asked about a male writer. Maybe because the answer is so obvious for a man, that fame trumps domestic happiness? As its title hints, this novel is a nod to that great film of 25 years back, "Shakespeare in Love." In it, Shakespeare loses the love of his life but gains in return the inspiration to write his genius plays. As I recall, the possibility that this was the worse outcome is never seriously considered. Sure, it's sad, but, Shakespeare. Disappointment in love was just part of the path to becoming Shakespeare, the real story being his genius.
I think the real story with Austen is also her genius; the fact that she was always writing about love throws people off the trail of this crucial fact. Jane in Love is a very entertaining example of this misdirection, however....more
This book was published in the mid 1920s, and it recounts, with many illustrations and photographs, the history of inns in England from the 15th centuThis book was published in the mid 1920s, and it recounts, with many illustrations and photographs, the history of inns in England from the 15th century onward, though focusing most on the period of the late 18th century until the coming of the railroads in the 1830s and 1840s, which brought an abrupt end to the golden age of coaching inns.
So it's very weird reading it now, nearly 100 years later. The authors of the book are clearly pining for a lost England -- it's written in a particular style, less flowery than you would find in the 19th century but clearly of an era different from our own. At some points they imagine certain scenes -- London, 1480s, say -- and paint the scene for the reader, trying to picture everything, as if trying to will themselves into the past. There's an entire chapter about signage, and the names of inns. Discussions of architecture. At some points it devolves into simply lists of names: of towns in England, and the quaint inns to be found there. Name-checks of many figures from English history I've never heard of along with some I have.
Reading this I can't help being thinking that at the time they were writing this the Great War had ended less than a decade earlier; England, and the rest of the world, was utterly transformed and would continue to be. This sense of loss is never mentioned but for me it seemed to hang over everything in the book.
And of course part of this is what a reader of today brings to it. There was considerable poignancy in the part where they describe the warren of medieval streets around St. Paul's Cathedral in London or the charms of Coventry, for example. The last chapter is a sort of guide for the adventurous motor-car owner of the mid 1920s who wants to go see some of these charming old-fashioned inns and unspoiled English countryside he's (surely a he) has been reading about. Cars, of course, would soon transform this countryside more thoroughly than the railroads ever could, but I don't suppose the authors of the book could have imagined that either....more
Interesting! The introduction accompanying the kindle version of this book I borrowed from the library informs me this was one of du Maurier's last boInteresting! The introduction accompanying the kindle version of this book I borrowed from the library informs me this was one of du Maurier's last books, written in her 60s and decades after works like Rebecca, My Cousin Rachel, and Jamaica Inn had made her rich and famous. It was also written in the 1960s, and reflects the preoccupations of that era.
This tale of intermittent time travel that may be time travel or may merely be an illusion/hallucination had some interesting structural similarities with another novel I recently read, The Heavens by Sandra Newman, though I have to think Newman's was considerably more artful and fun to read. But the idea of losing your grip on "reality" -- or not being sure which reality is actually real, of falling in love with the past, with its beauty and danger -- are common to both.
In this case, the fuel for the journeys to the past is a dangerous hallucinogenic drug synthesized by the narrator's mad-scientist friend Magnus. It seems to be something like mushrooms, or LSD, but it reads like a drug trip written by someone who's never been on one. I was both fascinated and disturbed by the first-person narrator. As in My Cousin Rachel, du Maurier is speaking with the voice of a man -- a man, moreover, who seems to really hate and fear women, even as he's drawn to them. Also a man who can't really deal with the world as it is, but needs to escape somehow, like into the past. Also, a man who can't really deal with himself.
Du Maurier is a writer who I am fascinated by without actually enjoying her writing very much. Her weirdness draws me in somehow, her obsessions become my obsessions, at least in the time I spend reading her books. One obsessions is the Brontes: she breathes in their spirit more than most writers who take them on, I think, and she gets at their essential strangeness....more
I found so much to admire about this novel, yet it left me feeling a little flat in the end and I am trying to work out why.
In some respects I am remI found so much to admire about this novel, yet it left me feeling a little flat in the end and I am trying to work out why.
In some respects I am reminded of Come With Me, another recent novel I read recently using science and technology as a way to talk about love and friendship, roads not taken, etc. Lost and Wanted has a lot more science, however, and for me at least is a more affecting story. There is a great deal about physics and the life of an academic, but also about the routines of being a parent. The exchanges the main character, Helen, has with her son and with another child, the daughter of her deceased best friend who ends up living in the basement apartment with her widowed father, were among my favorite aspects of the book. They are neither sentimental nor generic, but particular and weird the way life itself is. I also admired the nonlinear way the story was spun out, how it jumped between years without being confusing, and the gentle sense of suspense thus created.
What I think was less successful for me was some difficulty I had with the first-person narrator. At times Helen is sharply perceptive, noticing wonderfully subtle things about the people and situations around her. Yet she also at other points is presented as -- and truly seems -- quite awkward, a nerdy scientist who doesn't know how to relate to people. I know people are complicated and not always exactly the same way, but she didn't quite cohere for me, and this created some confusion, putting a distance between the reader and the teller. Part of it may have been related to the nonlinear storytelling -- we are jumping back in time to various earlier moments in her life and friendship with Charlie, whose death opens the action of the novel. Perhaps Helen has changed over time, become smarter about people? A difficulty of telling a story this way is that is harder to create a sense of change and progression.
This is one of those novels where everyone is annoyingly remarkable in some way: excessively good-looking, super-smart, or a Harvard professor, etc. You just have to deal with that.
The novels opens as a bit of a modern ghost story: Helen seems to be receiving text messages and email from her dead friend, and throwing all the physics in implies that somehow we will get some kind of spooky quantum explanation for why. The resolution of this mystery seems to try to have it both ways. Helen's efforts at romantic connection likewise fail; we are left with the sense that her life will be about science and her son, and that has to be OK. On one hand I admire the writer's refusal to tie everything up in a neat bow and give us a Hollywoodish happy ending. On the other I suppose I wanted something...more self-awareness? I don't know. Endings are hard; this certainly is not a terrible one.
On the sentence level I enjoyed this book a lot and found I had to read it slowly, not because it was confusing, but it demanded (and rewarded) patience.
I stayed up well past my regularly scheduled bedtime to read this one, which addresses subjects close to my heart: time travel, tReally, really good!
I stayed up well past my regularly scheduled bedtime to read this one, which addresses subjects close to my heart: time travel, the butterfly effect, the private lives of great writers. Even as I couldn't put it down, I was already thinking that I would need to go back and re-read it soon, to understand more about how Sandra Newman achieves the effects she does.
What The Heavens does with particular skill is to paint a convincing picture of the beauty and squalor/tedium of life in Elizabethan England through well-chosen sensory details and convincing dialogue (they talk like people from Shakespeare plays, but since most of the reported conversations actually take place with Shakespeare, that works). It is also very good at using the well-chosen detail to portray a slightly (or sometimes more than slightly) off version of our own reality, such as a person travelling in time and setting off the butterfly effect might create.
There is always going to be a moment in a time travel story where you go, "Wait, that doesn't make any sense." After reading many of them and trying to write one, I've concluded this is inherent to the project: our storytelling brains are not equipped to handle truly nonlinear narrative (as opposed to linear but told out of order) that violates the basic laws of cause and effect. And so it is here, but the plot is not so much the point of this story, so little harm is done to the work over all....more
I found this really tough going for the first 30 percent or so, but was reluctant to give up, and it did improve for me as the many plot threads beganI found this really tough going for the first 30 percent or so, but was reluctant to give up, and it did improve for me as the many plot threads began to weave together.
The novel is well titled: of all the various issues raised in a world where time travel has become just a thing people do, the focus is squarely on the psychological effects on the time travelers themselves, and on their friends and relatives and partners who are not time travelers but who must live with people jumping in and out of time. What does it do to a person, to know their own future and the future of others? What does it mean if the dead are not really gone, because you go can go back and see them when they are still alive? How does it affect your idea of yourself, to be able to interact with your future selves?
All these things seem to have a damaging effect on time travelers, making them amoral and incapable of feeling true emotion. If everything has already happened, is already known, can be relived at will, how does our existence actually have weight? Put that way, it reminds me a little of the famous opening of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, another book that explores the role of chance and fate in human affairs.
It is unclear if it's actually time travel causing the time travelers to become so morally bankrupt though. There is another possible explanation, namely that the head of the time travel organization, a cartoonishly villainous woman, has corrupted the culture of the organization from the start.
This novel raised a lot of interesting ideas for me, and I greatly enjoyed the time traveler jargon (there's even a glossary at the end) and the fact that time machines had a particular smell.
The chief difficulty I had with it was the characters. There were a lot of them, connected in obscure and overlapping ways, never clearly distinguished on first meeting and thereafter always running together for me. The story was also told out of chronological order, which makes sense for a story about time travel but made it doubly hard to keep people clear in my mind, and to remember whether they were supposed to be young or old versions of themselves at any given point. This difficulty in connecting with the characters made it hard for me to care about what happened to them -- or would happen -- or had already happened.
It's a complicated story that in my view would have benefited greatly from a stronger and more omniscient narrator than it has: one of those voice of god types, like in Middlemarch, or even The Unbearable Lightness of Being, to step in from time to time and comment on the action, to unify the many moving parts for the reader. Instead, we have something like William Gibson's narrator in The Peripheral, with the action being seen through close third of whoever's story we are following at that particular moment. Gibson, though, confines himself to only two such perspectives -- Flynne in one timeline and Wilf in another -- and makes the two enough unlike another that the difference is illuminating. Here, we have numerous people, all sounding quite like each other, so the effect is more muddled.
I see that some other readers have complained about the formatting problems that often made it unclear who was saying which line of dialogue. I concur. It was not enough to cause incomprehension, but it was irritating and may have added to the sense I was having that the characters here all sounded kind of alike, both in their spoken words and their private thoughts....more
Although this book is apparently very famous in England, I'd never heard of it until reading Daeamon Voices. Pullman describes the book in such a way Although this book is apparently very famous in England, I'd never heard of it until reading Daeamon Voices. Pullman describes the book in such a way that I was curious to read it at once.
This is really, really good and deservedly famous, one of those books that is interesting in itself and yet about so much more than its purported subject: a lonely boy, a mysterious clock, a garden that appears at the back of the house only when the clock strikes 13. It's about time, death, the world of dreams vs. reality growing up, about nothing more or less than life itself. ...more
Clever, engrossing and formally inventive in the way it fillets a classic country-house murder mystery and lays each bit out on the autopsy table, as Clever, engrossing and formally inventive in the way it fillets a classic country-house murder mystery and lays each bit out on the autopsy table, as it were. I was thinking as I read it that the novel would succeed or fail on to what extent I was prepared to buy the frame narrative that would explain why all this was happening. I would say I accept it about 80 or 85 percent. It's satisfying -- not gratifyingly astonishing, but not ridiculous either.
I found myself thinking of another recent book, Version Control, which also is mind-bending and timey-wimey, which also ends with the figure of the artist, putting it all together....more
