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.
Rating: 
Summary: Have to read it to believe it
Review: This book was erotica to say the least...but so much more. The plot is so interesting. A man who has the power to stop time and use his extremely vivid and sensual imagination in the most bizarre and fascinating ways. The way Baker explores the mind in his writing is unbelievable. The book was difficult to put down. His writing style is thoroughly enjoyable. A recommendation to any reader with an open-mind.
Rating:
Summary: Sex, Word, and Idea Play
Review: This erotic or "rot" (as the intellectual hero who can stop time by pushing up his glasses likes to call it) work by Nicholson Baker (author of the earlier Vox, about phone sex) is a wonderful literary experiment--a blend of wordplay, and slightly self-conscious and deliciously quasi-guilty fantasies come true (at least in the literary frame) due to the protagonist's ability to dip into what he calls the Fold, or the Drop--the time-stopped world where women can not only be undressed, playing with their bodies, but also subliminally seduced--by stopping time and arranging things along the periphery of their vision--or along their Mons veneris. In an acrobatic bit of literary legerdemain Baker straddles, if that's the right word, the vapid world of what used to be called (before the advent of videotape) "one-handed books," that is of paperback smut, and the effete, elite world of imaginative literature. the result is an original blend that tweaks the neurons as well as the spermato- and oo-systems. Although Fermata unflinchingly uses proper and slang terms for genitalia, there are some exciting and spoofy coinages such as "richard" for the male organ, and "vadge" and "Jamaica" for women's respective concave and convex accoutrements. ANd despite the book's lush invention and wicked detail, not to mention potent irony and delectation in minor violations, there is a continuous concern with--respect is the word--for women's wishes. In some passgaes Baker seems to sport a more thorough knowledge of female anatomy than some women may have of themselves. And Baker himself, no less than his writer-protagonist (there is the "rot" written by Arno Strine within the erotica written by Nicholson Baker), is fond of describing encounters of women with their own bodies, suitably supplemented by a wide range of amusingly named dilda, dildi (both plurals are used), and associated machines. The creativity-sexuality connection extends beyond the stopped time of this schoolboy masturbatory conceit made literary to a recently separated woman pleasuring herself while wildly mowing her already well-mowed lawn, to the protagonist's girlfriend's concocting clever contraptions of avocados and electric toothbrushes, and to a Cape Cod beach reader digging her hand in the sand to discover one of Strine's own erotic stories. So there is much fun going on here and, despite the occasional unflinching embrace of straight gutter talk, make no mistake, some extraordinary writing. There is also the literary approach to science fiction, with some fine passages on time (Strine is a temp), as well as the metafictional correspondence of stopped time and private one-way seduction to the time of reading. The inescapable conclusion is that the women lightly violated in the book are modeled on the "real" female reading audience Baker would like to "reach." But his morality and delicate sensibility--not to mention the reality of his distance--force him to stop short of the literary equivalent of full penetration. So we have ultimately a very nice metaphysic, a metafictional metaphysic, of the impossibility of fully satisfying the urge to merge. The situation is reminiscent of Slavoj Ziaek's interpretation of cybersex as fulfilling French psychoanalyst Jacque Lacan's dictum that "there is no sexual relationship [liaison.]" The only criticism I could se one making (apart from the lack of a story per se) is that the emotional palette of the characters remains, for all its subtle intelligence, rather blandly collegiate. All-in-all a most amusing fiction and a highly accomplished literary experiment.
Rating:
Summary: Stop, pause, wait
Review: This is probably my favorite book from Nicholson Baker, the modern master of minutiae. Mr. Baker has a gift for capturing the essence of habits, thoughts, reactions, and objects that are so small, so insignificant that most people don't ever notice them ... and yet when Mr. Baker puts them on the page, he gets it just right. None of the half dozen of so books I've read from Mr. Baker sound like much when the plots are summarized, and that is certainly the case with The Fermata. The book's story line is based on the ability of the 35-year-old narrator Arno Strine to somehow stop time, and most of the pages are used up with explorations of how he decides what he can and can't do while time is stopped. The unimpressive story line means that the value of the book depends almost entirely on Mr. Baker's ability to keep the prose engaging. Sometimes it doesn't work (as with his more recent effort Box of Matches) and sometimes it works well, as with The Fermata. As always, what holds it together when it works is Mr. Baker's memory for trivia, his intelligence, and his eye for detail: witness the title: "Fermata," the noun form of the word "stop" in Italian, is also a musical term that means holding a note longer than the time value -- a perfect name for a book with this kind of plot. Ultimately, my criticism of The Fermata is one shared by all of Mr. Baker's books and all literature based on prose rather than memorable plots or characters. In my mind, they're like the old cliché about Chinese food, which tastes great but leaves you hungry a few hours later. In the case of this book, the prose keeps the pages turning, but when you're through, very little of it sticks with you.
Rating: 
Summary: File this one under: bizarre / erotica.
Review: This is the fourth book by Baker I've read and it's closest in content to Vox. The Fermata is narrated by Arno Strine, a 35-year-old temp who has the ability to stop time and move around in an arrested moment. His chief use of this power is to undress various women in order to ogle or grope them. He also engages in various masturbatory experiments which involve placing his own typed up erotica where it'll be found by various women and then watching their reactions to it. The Fermata is graphic, lewd, and sometimes very funny. It is both sexually explicit and intelligent writing ' a very odd diversion of a book. I was getting bored with it about halfway through its 300 pages but then read a little more and with a bemused smirk settled on my face, finished it off. Nicholson Baker is nothing if not inventive. Even the euphemisms he comes up with to describe female genitalia are inventive, from "flowerbox" to "Georgia O'Keeffe." This is definitely the most sexually explicit book I've ever read. The next book I'm going to read is going to be something more "normal." This was twistin' my melon, man.
Rating:
Summary: Weird, fun, brilliant and sexy
Review: This is the story of Arno Strine, narrating his autobiography, as he writes it. Arno is a 35-year-old office temp who discovers he has a bizarre, unique ability. He can stop time, that is, stop everything going on around him, while he, alone in the world, can do what he wants, while time is stopped. What would you do? He uses this ability mostly to sexually molest women, although he has a certain honor about how he goes about it. For example, he won't do anything that constitutes rape. Nor will he do anything else that is illegal (except for a lot of groping and fondling). A strange premise, but Nicholson Baker carries it off with humor and style. This is the funniest book I have read in years. Quite possibly I laughed more at this book than any other I've ever read. Beware though--this is not for the faint of heart or those who are disgusted by pornography. Parts of this qualify as hard core porn, but that's part of the plan. Just how far can a person's thoughts go before a line is crossed to depravity? Perhaps we all have our own answers to that. Read this book and find out your own answer. You'll probably have a great time!
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