Rating: 
Summary: not funny, nothing interesting to say
Review: Baker came up with a great premise, and a great theme but he just failed to tie everything together nicely. The book is almost totally devoid of humanity, except for a last minute attempt to provide the main charector some. It's hard to be funny when there's no life to your story.That doesn't even go into the fact that Baker seems to have no idea how to write a female charector, i mean i'm male but the way the women in this story acted and reacted was ludicrous. Baker goes off on long tangents frequently which are supposed to be amusing, but they just become tiresome. To see random tangents done right read The Tetherballs of Bougainville by Mark Leyner. Baker doesn't totally grasp what is funny thinking that bizarre sexual fantasies are amusing. I mean they are but only when they are ridiculous not disturbing. I must say though I wish I had this guy's powers, and yeah when I think about it I guess all I would is look at women with their clothes off, but at least my autobiography would be about something...like say a profound life lesson i learned because of my ability. So that my book you know, has a reason to exist.
Rating: 
Summary: Great bookl, but not for the faint of heart.
Review: I have to admit that this is my favorite Nicholson Baker book by far. It is positively obscene, so if that bugs you then skip this review and forget about reading the book. To everyone else: this is one of the funniest, weirdest and most endearing books I have ever read. It doesn't have a lot in the way of plot, but the theme and Baker's prose more than make up for it. As a previous reviewer mentioned, Baker has more words for the various parts of the female body than Eskimos have for snow. My favorite is "jamaicas", but I'm not telling what it means. If you like Baker's style (and I would say that this is closer in style to the Mezannine than Vox, minus the footnotes) then there's a lot to like about this book. Highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Great bookl, but not for the faint of heart.
Review: I have to admit that this is my favorite Nicholson Baker book by far. It is positively obscene, so if that bugs you then skip this review and forget about reading the book. To everyone else: this is one of the funniest, weirdest and most endearing books I have ever read. It doesn't have a lot in the way of plot, but the theme and Baker's prose more than make up for it. As a previous reviewer mentioned, Baker has more words for the various parts of the female body than Eskimos have for snow. My favorite is "jamaicas", but I'm not telling what it means. If you like Baker's style (and I would say that this is closer in style to the Mezannine than Vox, minus the footnotes) then there's a lot to like about this book. Highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Great writing, fails to find a theme.
Review: I loved The Fermata's first half. Fine writing, great control of tone and voice. God, what a voice. Charming, erudite, witty. Delightful. But then the novel becomes more and more pornographic. It goes from a modern version of Henry Miller to a modern version of The Story Of O. The character writes a series of X-rated stories to seduce women. The first one is witty and funny, but they get more explicit and more heavy handed as the story progresses. Ultimately the novel fails to find a theme. Nicholson Baker is a fine technician writing well, but he doesn't really understand what he's writing about, so he slaps a kind of hokey ending on and calls it quits. I was very disappointed in the end.
Rating: 
Summary: A risqué romp by a master of the tongue (so to speak)
Review: In 1994, very shortly after this lark of a book appeared, I picked it up on a whim at an airport bookstore just before embarking on a long overseas flight. It was the perfect choice, but my companion didn't think so; I kept interrupting her own reading to share choice passages, whether she wanted to hear them or not. It's just that kind of book, if you're the sort of reader who loves original and creative use of the language. Bostonian Arno Strine, reader, writer, and all-round intellectual, has made a career for himself as an office temp, simply because there are more important things in his life: Namely, the ability to drop out of time, to stop the world and get off, to escape the noise and bustle for the silence and solitude of the Fold. When the power is on him, he can cause the entire universe to come to a halt (via various mechanical and psychological mechanisms that vary over time), allowing him to go where he likes and do what he likes with no one the wiser. But Arno, being Arno, rather than using this ability to become wealthy, or snoop into international secrets, or wield unlimited social or political power, mostly just takes women's clothes off, and hides in their clothes hampers while they bathe, and writes personalized erotica (or "rot") for them to discover when time restarts. He's had plenty of "normal" relationships with women, but his one attempt to tell a woman about his activities outside of time was not a success. However, the story line is just Baker's excuse to indulge himself in highly creative (and often pornographic) flights of fancy in Arno's voice, who seems almost incapable of sticking to his subject. But there are plenty of quotable lines here, like "Each woman inspires her own fetishes" (which is very true when you think about it), and "Temps are prima facie alienated by virtue of their vocational rootlessness." Arno is also extremely analytical, not only of himself but of everything around him, including the impact of masturbation on carpal tunnel syndrome, social interaction between temps and full-time workers, the sexual impact of removing one's wristwatch in public, and the rotational capabilities of various types of centrifuge. Even his fantasy life is extremely detailed. At base, Baker is a hoot and you can't take him too seriously -- but on the other hand, probably you should. As in all his work, you know for sure he's paying attention to what's really going on.
Rating:
Summary: This is one of the worst things I've ever read.
Review: In fact it's so amazingly, unspeakably *BAD* that I couldn't stop reading it, like the hole in one's tooth one can't keep from sticking their tongue into, or like most of the material on rotten.com. This repulsive, purile book has only the thinnest tissue of a plot and spends most of its time obsessing over the main character's obsession with the minutia of sex. I felt like I was inside the mind of the average horny sixteen year old boy.
So why do I give the book five stars? Because it's JUST THAT BAD. It's almost so bad it's good. It's a putrid, stinking, utterly inspired and ingenious piece of cr*p. It's so bad I had to keep reading to see what happened to the main character. It's so bad I can't stop going on about how bad it is, anymore than I could bring myself to stop watching Pink Flamingos the first time.
Perhaps it's destined to become a cult classic.
Rating:
Summary: Curiosity boggled the mind
Review: Most novels by mainstream authors have the same problem: they come up with an exciting story but have trouble writing it with any eloquence or style. The Fermata is the opposite. The plot, one must admit, is very sophomoric. The main character has the ability to stop time and uses it to go on weird sexual escapades. It's not an original plot to say the least. If it hadn't been covered by the Twilight Zone already, every person in the world has probably had this wish in their head at least once. Imagine all of the homework or housework (or other stuff) you could get done if you stopped time.
But Nicholson Baker has a very unusual gift of cloaking the obscene in tasteful description, even if most of it is graphic. It almost makes you forgive both Arno (the main character) and Baker for going into long pornographic episodes with dicey dialogue.
But not all of the book is easy to read. Graphic sections aside, some passages are trying just because they try to build as a tease. Chapter 15 is tedious, and 16 is just bizarre. And to be truthful, I can't decide between three or four stars for this book. The tedious description burdened me as much as the frank and intelligent description engaged me.
I feel the need to admit that the humor got lost on me. All over my paperback copy are comments from book critics saying that this an honest and hilarous account. Others say it's very truthful and funny. The point is there was an element of humor to Baker's writing that seemed to slip by me. The tone itself is not that humorous, but I suppose it might lie in the delivery. Perhaps I need someone with a wry, deadpan voice to read the passages about (...) to me.
Read a copy at work if you dare.
Rating:
Summary: Verging on bad taste, you'll hate yourself for liking it
Review: Okay, let's get the central conceit out in the open: Arno Strine is this guy with the ability to stop time, which he uses to take women's clothes off. Yeah, I agree, sophomoric. Yet I dare you to find a heterosexually oriented teenage boy (or ex-teenage boy) who hasn't had this fantasy. Even so, why are we getting this from Baker, who publishes in places like The New Yorker not Penthouse. My guess is that it was an experiment--could Baker raise the concept beyond pornography by the style and manner of its writing? He even succeeds at times, finding a poetry of desire and curiosity in detail that goes beyond mere titillation, that somehow corresponds with basic human nature. However, the sections where he does not overcome the salaciousness of the idea are as--in my view--pornographic as anything posted in, say, alt.sex.stories, which posts have much, much less literary ambition. The ending redeems this dual nature only somewhat (the character does change and mature, something that I had not expected through a full three-fourths of the book), but I hesitate to suggest this to people unaccustomed to "adult" material. On the other hand, er, let me rephrase that...the innuendoes are dangerous when you have material of this type...The Fermata is much better reading than The Starr Report.
Rating: 
Summary: "The Fermata" will change the way you think of Baker
Review: The gist of this book is bizarre pornography, way beyond "Vox." The fantasies are puerile, and there's a fascination with excrement. That Baker could follow this book with "The Everlasting Story of Nory" is an instance of Michael-Jacksonesque weirdness. Prior to reading Fermata I admired Baker; now, I'm not so sure. This was not my cup of tea at all.
Rating:
Summary: Wow! you missed the boat folks
Review: This book was amazing literary work disguised in wonderfully filthy text and I truly feel a tugging saddness for those that didn't get it. It is hilarious, inventive and Baker is not dimminished a bit. The fact that some folks can't understand that it came from the author of "...Nory" is a testiment to the rigid need to classify which Baker always seeks to tear down and he does so masterfully in this book.
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