You Shall Know Our Velocity

Rating:
Summary: You Shall Know Our Duplicity
Review: This is the worst, most meandering, sophomoric book I have ever picked up. Witness the hype machine printing money in full force as the pomo critics at the corporate conglomerates spam the world with ridiculous blurbs, all hoping to be allowed to publish in McSweeneys someday.

I challenge anyone who has read this book to answer this--who are the characters? What are they up against? What moral dilemmas to they face? Who is the protagonsit, the antagonist? What is the catharsis? Why should we care about them? Is it a tragedy or comedy? What happens? Who changes? Where is the dramatic action? Who falls in love?

Sadly, the novel is lacking these classical traits. Eggers lacks the talent to render them, and perhaps the incentive too, as a far better living can be made off of meandering, pandering hype, wasting shelf space and killing trees to fund the great egos of our generation.

Rating:
Summary: You shall know Dave Eggers
Review: Dave Eggers will win the Nobel Prize someday if they decide to award smugness. He is the master of being self-effacing, and at the very same time self-indulgent. He wants both sympathy and adulation. Dave Eggers should run for political office instead of write.

Eggers engages in what I call "prose babble" which is very common among today's writers. Prose babble is a disease that has brought American Literature to its grave. He does not know how to write well, as much as talk well, and then write down how he talks. So essentially you get a first-person talk-a-thon novel rather than a written novel. Things like economy, vocabulary, and style are gone from these works. But you got a good friend talking to you, but you may not want to hear him go on and on and on.

Rating:
Summary: Sick of Mentally Lazy Reviewers...
Review: I just have to say that with a book of this type and caliber it's fun to go through the reviews here and see who "got it" and who didn't.
If you didn't get it, dear fellow reviewer, then just say you didn't.

Be honest. It's ok.

Don't attack the author for your own mental laziness. Did the book not follow your beloved "classical" constructions? Did you have to figure things out for yourself, rather than being spoonfed? You should thank such an author for giving you a little mental exercise.

Rating:
Summary: A Must-Read -- Or at least Pretty Darn Good.
Review: You Shall Know Our Velocity is Dave Eggers' follow-up to his Heart-Breaking Work of Staggering Genius from 2000. While I really liked his first book, it seemed to get rather mixed reviews. A lot of people whined about how "self-obsessed" he was, and how it was "just about his life," but come on, it was basically a MEMOIR, that was the POINT, what do you WANT him to talk about. Still though, I can sort of see what they're saying. Some people want books to be more plot-driven, and I guess if that's what you like then, yeah, you probably thought Genius sucked. What I loved about it though is how, through the book, you felt like you really knew Dave. He's got this great, easy, first-person style that makes it feel like he's talking directly to you. He's also totally hilarious, and occasionally has these moments of, just, total brilliance that make you cry and admit that, yes, he is a genius.

So anyway, I think You Shall Know Our Velocity might have slightly more widespread appeal than Genius did. It has a little bit more of a plot at least, it's not openly just Dave talking about his life. He keeps the extremely personal first-person technique though, and you get the feeling that a lot of the stuff he's writing about is again coming straight from his own life. The main characters are two best friends, Will and Hand, who are trying to come to terms with the recent death of their other best friend, Jack. Will, THE main character, the one telling the story, also has a lot of money he doesn't know what to do with. He has the idea that getting rid of all the money, giving it away to strangers, will have some kind of cleansing effect - get rid of the misplaced guilt he feels for Jack's death, make him understand things better. So he embarks on a one-week trip around the world with Hand, planning to give away $30,000 by handing out treasure maps and taping cash to donkeys.

I can't really explain why I like this book so much. It's like - you know how you want all your friends to write books? How their postcards and stories on the internet and notes taped to your door are great, but what you would really love is for everybody to write long, awesome, incredible BOOKS? That's what this book is like. You don't actually KNOW Will/Eggers, but it doesn't matter. He's constantly having these ideas ridiculously similar to ideas I've always had and doing things I've always wanted to do, and his writing style is just so personal, that you feel like you know this guy, that he's your best friend.

Staggering Genius was incredibly sad at times, and someone told me that Velocity left them terribly depressed, so I was sort of worried about reading it. The book focuses a lot on death, so it IS pretty paranoid and depressing at times, but I thought that as a whole it was actually pretty, um, "uplifting", though not at all in a corny or roll-your-eyes kind of way.

I would recommend this book to basically anyone who likes to read (and if you don't I hate you). It's hilarious but not stupidly and obviously so, and is also very moving at times. An all-around great book. Two other quick Amazon picks, both lesser-known, are: [e-mail] by Tom Grimes, The Losers' Club by Richard Perez

Rating:
Summary: Wonderful tour de force about grief!
Review: You Shall Know Our Velocity is an excellent novel dealing with the grieving Will, the novel's narrator, and his best friend Hand experience after the tragic death of Jack, the third in their former threesome. The three had been friends since childhood and had always expected to be together, until Jack is suddenly killed in an accident. To deal with their grief, or maybe to escape from it, Hand and Will plan a trip around the world in one week to give away the $80,000 that Will has acquired almost by accident. The novel concerns both this trip and Will's story of his friendship with Jack. Their travels never go as intended, but self-discovery is forthcoming. Will's reflections on Jack's death are devastatingly touching. Dave Eggers is an excellent writer and the novel is, for the most part, a heartbreaking work of staggering genius. It will make you laugh and break your heart in the same paragraph many times. I couldn't put this novel down. Highly recommended...

Rating:
Summary: Gooey . . . but in a good way
Review: I think the thing that is most impressive about Dave Eggers writing is that you can read a paragraph at a time, and you never really lose the feeling of the work. YSKOV is like that. I read it over the course of several months, literally stealing a few minutes everyday to read a couple of lines. The plot, which is more literary device than driving force in this book, just oozes along as you dive into the psyches of the two main characters.

It's like reading 'Ulysses' . . . if you go too fast, you get lost. And just when you think you can't go any further, Eggers gives you a Monty Python "...and now for something completely different" section to give your aching synapses a breather before heading back into the fray.

On the whole, an excellent book, especially if as a reader you don't mind if plot is secondary to experience. If you'd rather read a book than feel it, try 'A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius' first. In short: great book, rough read.

Rating:
Summary: The Jumping Men have spoken.
Review: I don't know what book other reviewers have read, but I'm inclined to think it wasn't this one. Or, at the very least, they didn't pay all that much attention.

YSKOV is about a world wide jaunt. But as with any great book, it's about so much more.

Let me ask, do you think Old Man and the Sea was solely about an old man on a fishing trip?

The main plot in YSKOV, the trip and the subsequent random acts of charity therein, are secondary elements.

This book is about a trip, that much is true, but not just a trip to far off contries. It's about a trip through the wounded and recovering psyche of a lost soul. It's about the urge to find's oneself, and all the vain and unsuccessful attempts at doing so. It's about the need for freedom, while still craving structure. It's about the desire to better ourselves, and in doing so, bettering the world in which we live.

It's about confronting the past. It's about using sorrow instead of running from it. It's about taking a chance, risking failure, if for no other reason than chalking up another gained experience.

In the end, You Shall Know Our Velocity is about nothing more than love. Love for our brothers, friends, parents. Love for our pasts and love for our futures. Love for ourselves and love for humanity.

Rating:
Summary: An interesting style
Review: This book is about the adventures of two main characters, Will and Hand, as they travel the world in a week dispersing large amounts of money to complete strangers along the way; in particular, strangers who give them directions. The book is written as if the reader were inside Will's head, thus the style of writing can seem a bit disjointed and distracting at first as Will's thoughts tend to ramble and roam. Once adjusting to this style, the situations these two young men find themselves in are hilarious. I especially enjoyed the author's additions of pictures throughout the book, tying them in with the actual story.

I found that the biggest problem with this story was a section of 50 pages titled, Interruption by Hand. This section is placed in the middle of the story, but what the reader learns reading these pages drastically changes the view of the story. Upon finishing Hand's thoughts, I was no longer interested in the rest of the book. I was so disappointed in the last 100 pages that I would recommend skipping the Interruption by Hand and leaving that section to read last, despite the author's insistence that it be in the middle, thus making the ending more climactic.

Rating:
Summary: The big three
Review: Three books that I've recently read and thoroughly enjoyed are: The Birth of Venus, Jackson McCrae's Bark of the Dogwood, and You Shall know our Velocity. Of these, "You Shall Know" was my favorite. Now, I did read A Heartbreaking Work and thought it was excellent, but I have to say that "You Shall Know" was much better. I highly recommend this fresh new read to anyone interested in great literature.

Rating:
Summary: thanks for playing...
Review: The good news. I liked it better than AHWOSG.

The bad news. I still don't care. I tried to give this book a fair shake after being so disappointed with 'Heartbreaking,' but it didn't redeem itself.

The probelm that I have with stories and novels of this ilk is that of the elements of a story - plot, characterization, conflict, etc. - is that they all tend to be missing one of more of those elements. There has to be growth, or change, a moment of clarity, something, but I just couldn't find it. And it is fine for an author to be experimental, play fast and loose with the rules, e.g. Joyce, Beckett, Salinger, etc., but I can't see Eggers doing more than the literary equivalent of mugging for the camera.