Man Versus Himself

Rating:
Summary: In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is CEO.
Review: Erik Benson's novel takes you inside the mind of an eccentric inventor of cities, nearing death and becoming increasingly obsessed with not becoming obsolete. As his mental state begins deteriorating the book really becomes hard to put down, and Benson's writing is wildly innovative and interesting. You don't know where he's taking you and you don't know exactly where you've wound up when it's all over. But one thing is sure, that place is creepy. It is like the feeling you get at the end of a David Lynch movie. Something is wrong, but you're not quite sure what it is. It is like the voice of Hal from 2001.
Benson's novel is timely in that it is colored with multiple planned communities, invasive information-gathering technologies, and office power politics. But its core is constructed around more timeless conflicts. When a man defines himself by what he produces, what happens once he becomes unproductive? And as our memory fails us, what remains of our identity? As death nears and our bodies deteriorate, what recourse do we have? Can we impose our identity on someone or something else? Will we resort to nonsense or destruction? Or can we find some synthesis with everything outside of ourselves and slip away quietly and peaceably?
Ultimately, Benson's first novel is a lyrical and fast-moving story that examines both group social behavior, the future of technology, and the most personal internal conflicts of man. It definitely holds up to multiple readings, which is my mark of a great book.

Rating:
Summary: In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is CEO.
Review: Erik Benson's novel takes you inside the mind of an eccentric inventor of cities, nearing death and becoming increasingly obsessed with not becoming obsolete. As his mental state begins deteriorating the book really becomes hard to put down, and Benson's writing is wildly innovative and interesting. You don't know where he's taking you and you don't know exactly where you've wound up when it's all over. But one thing is sure, that place is creepy. It is like the feeling you get at the end of a David Lynch movie. Something is wrong, but you're not quite sure what it is. It is like the voice of Hal from 2001.
Benson's novel is timely in that it is colored with multiple planned communities, invasive information-gathering technologies, and office power politics. But its core is constructed around more timeless conflicts. When a man defines himself by what he produces, what happens once he becomes unproductive? And as our memory fails us, what remains of our identity? As death nears and our bodies deteriorate, what recourse do we have? Can we impose our identity on someone or something else? Will we resort to nonsense or destruction? Or can we find some synthesis with everything outside of ourselves and slip away quietly and peaceably?
Ultimately, Benson's first novel is a lyrical and fast-moving story that examines both group social behavior, the future of technology, and the most personal internal conflicts of man. It definitely holds up to multiple readings, which is my mark of a great book.

Rating:
Summary: Self-acclaimed self-published author reviews his own book!
Review: Man Versus Himself is a first person account of an extremely successful business man, named Anselm Betty, as he faces the end of his career and the disintegration of everything he has worked to build over the course of his 89 years. I'm fascinated with the concept of losing everything, and this book was my attempt at seeing what I could pull out of that universal dilemma.

I wrote it in 24 consecutive days during the month of November, 2002. It's heavy on project management philosophy and office politics, as those were the biggest things on my mind coming into the project. I became obsessed with the idea of justifying your life in the same terms and with the same vocabulary that companies justify projects. Business case formulas are so clean and the analyses are built to measure value, so it was a natural fit to solve the problem of doing something of value with your life. Anselm is a blend of many strong CEO types that have become legendary over the last 5 years; he is the child of literature, the media, and the entrepreneurial spirit.

I plan on having as much fun with this process as possible, doing some text manipulation with the manuscript (see manversushimself.net for some stuff like charting sentence length per chapter and building Markov chains), and experimenting with various ways of promoting the book through the weblog community and this website's numerous list-making and review-promoting features. If it all flops, oh well, I won't be too heart-broken.

Rating:
Summary: What goes through Erik's mind?
Review: What if Erik was an 89 year old CEO? What if Erik lived in a city he created? This book gives insight into the wonderful imagination of Erik. He's a great story teller, although I had to skip over some of the computational subplots as I prefer more mindless reading. I've tried to convince Erik he needs to change the ending. Maybe I could pay some money for my own ending that could be posted on the http://manversushimself.net/ website because upon finishing the book I had to huck it across the room (like I did with some of my other favorite, emotion-inducing books). Read it to see for yourself.