Double or Nothing: A Real Fictitious Discourse

Rating:
Summary: absolutely fascinating genial eye-and-mindboggling
Review: my review is short -- a line from a great poem by w.b. yeats: how can you tell the dancer from the dance

Rating:
Summary: absolutely fascinating genial eye-and-mindboggling
Review: The structure of this book is ingeniuous - it's a guy writing a book about a guy writing a book about a 19 year old French Jewish boy coming to the US after his family is killed in the camps in WW2. This means you're immersed in this obsessive story about a guy planning on boying 365 days' worth of toilet paper and noodles and locking himself in a room to write, while the story about the kid is unrolled bit by bit, changed, modified, and improved. The typeography is all over the place, making the confusion even more profound by drawing things with the text, switching fonts, spacing, etc. There's a lot of humor in the obsession of the fictional writer, and the index/discourse at the end of the book is a killer. The writing puts it over the top, but the structure - the whole idea - is one of a kind.

Rating:
Summary: One of the best experimental novels out there
Review: The structure of this book is ingeniuous - it's a guy writing a book about a guy writing a book about a 19 year old French Jewish boy coming to the US after his family is killed in the camps in WW2. This means you're immersed in this obsessive story about a guy planning on boying 365 days' worth of toilet paper and noodles and locking himself in a room to write, while the story about the kid is unrolled bit by bit, changed, modified, and improved. The typeography is all over the place, making the confusion even more profound by drawing things with the text, switching fonts, spacing, etc. There's a lot of humor in the obsession of the fictional writer, and the index/discourse at the end of the book is a killer. The writing puts it over the top, but the structure - the whole idea - is one of a kind.