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Summary: HUH???
Review: This book IS going to have a sequel, right? Right??? It makes absolutely no sense otherwise!!!
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Summary: An amazing and bizarre read...
Review: This is my favorite Letham novel, and one of my favorite books. His imagination perplexes and amazes me. This man is truly creative, and his amorphous take on the apocalypse is a fine example of his work. you may want to read it twice, once just to enjoy the scenery, and a second time to pay attention to the point (which is delivered surprisingly clearly given the context).
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Summary: Amazingly original
Review: This might very well be the most original, head scrathing novel I've ever read. It's a bit like shifting randomly between a set of twilight zone episodes. You know something is quiet abnormal, but you don't get to sit still long enough to figure it all out. I'll just say that if when you were young you asked yourself, "what if I'm just imagining the whole world", and then went on to think, "hmm, what if someone else is just imagining me", then this is the book for you.
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Summary: Lethem's weakest, and I've read them all
Review: This story is really ridiculous. Not only is Chaos not interesting and completely shallow as a character, but the actual story is a big snooze fest. Letham hints at a lot of interesting ideas, but never really pulls through with anything. I didn't find Chaos believeable at all. Come on, how many times will he beat around the bush about asking questions about his life? He is like a meek little sheep you takes no control over his actions... until the unexciting end. Finally I find it strange that the author mentions the ethnicity of every non-white character. The young and black Vance, the black women, the Mexican. He never says, the white Gwen or the white Cal. This is an example of subtle racism as far as I am concerned. As if Lethams readers should just expect all the characters to be white.This book stinks!
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Summary: Dull, incomplete, with racist undertones
Review: This story is really ridiculous. Not only is Chaos not interesting and completely shallow as a character, but the actual story is a big snooze fest. Letham hints at a lot of interesting ideas, but never really pulls through with anything. I didn't find Chaos believeable at all. Come on, how many times will he beat around the bush about asking questions about his life? He is like a meek little sheep you takes no control over his actions... until the unexciting end. Finally I find it strange that the author mentions the ethnicity of every non-white character. The young and black Vance, the black women, the Mexican. He never says, the white Gwen or the white Cal. This is an example of subtle racism as far as I am concerned. As if Lethams readers should just expect all the characters to be white. This book stinks!
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Summary: Remarkable craftsmanship
Review: This was the first of Lethem's books that I read, and I was completely bowled over by it. Lethem's writing is dynamic and exciting even when he is writing about the most bizarre and banal topics (situations that are rare in his books). This is one of only a few books that I have re-read in my life, and I intend to re-read it again soon.
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Summary: An excellent example of a dream in written form.
Review: Though it does get slow and frustrating at times, I found it very interesting and original. It has all the elements of a dream - identity displacement, location displacement, time displacement and fantastic unrealistic elements in abundance. The answers to many questions are left to be hypothesized about but this just adds to it's dream-like qualities. Brillant but not for everyone.
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Summary: Amazing, Vertiginous Tour de Force
Review: What an amazing accomplishment is this book. It is simultaneously funny and sad, familiar yet very strange, and it moves along with a predictable rhythm while never actually going where you expect. Ever. Lethem has written some of the most inventive novels I've ever read -- "Girl in Landscape," "As She Climbed Across The Table," "Motherless Brooklyn" -- and he's just as creative here. His characters and the situations he puts them in ride the knife-edge between absolute believability and (some kind of) science fiction outlandishness, but it's to Lethem's credit that you never lose your attachments to his cast. The twists in this book -- which if you've read it you know about, and if not I couldn't BEGIN to explain them to you -- rank it right up with "Girl" for audacity. I was reminded of the movie "Being John Malkovich" or some of Fellini's work perhaps. Definitely the work of a major talent, both in scope and skill. His writing is so good it gave me vertigo.
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Summary: Lethem Loves Mystery More Than Solutions
Review: When I want a well-written book with a little imagination that I can knock off in a few hours, I pick up a book by Lethem. Amnesia Moon is my third, after Gun with Occasional Music and As She Climbed Across the Table. Compared to those two, I found Amnesia Moon superior in writing style and imagination. Lethem strings together his flights of imaginative fancy better than he did in Gun and has more of them than he did in Table. Also, despite the episodic nature of this story of an amnesiac who travels between alternate realities in a dreamlike odyessy, Lethem achieves a strong narrative flow to keep his audience reading. However, though he gives tantalizing hints as to the nature of the disaster that has turned the world into a patchwork of alternate societies with different pasts and rules, Lethem never commits to an answer. The solutions to the central mysteries our hero attempts to solve in his journey -- who he is, what happened, what his role in it was -- are promised, but Lethem reneges at the last moment. Where the answers are not important to the story, this does not bother me. (See K.W. Jeter's novel Farewell Horizontal for a strange setting that is never explained, and in which the lack of explanation is no detriment to the book.) But here, I got the sense Lethem would just plain rather be obscure -- or worse, that he could not think of a satisfying explanation and hoped that his failure to give us one would be written off as artistry. The journey to this unsatisfying ending is the best stuff of Lethem's I've read. I was completely absorbed by the story, enjoyed the characters, and loved his style. This would have been a four star book if he'd been able to follow through to the end.
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