Psalms For The End Of The World
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It's 1962 and physics student Grace Pulansky believes she has met the man of her dreams, Robert Jones, while serving up slices of pecan pie at the local diner. But then the FBI shows up, with their fedoras and off-the-rack business suits, and accuses him of being a bomb-planting mass-murderer. Finding herself on the run with Jones across America's Southwest, the discoveries awaiting Gracie will undermine everything she knows about the universe. Her story will reveal how scores of lives - an identity-swapping rock star, a mourning lover in ancient China, Nazi hunters in pursuit of a terrible secret, a crazed artist in pre-revolutionary France, an astronaut struggling with a turbulent interplanetary future, and many more - are interconnected across space and time by love, grief, and quantum entanglement. Spanning continents, centuries, and dimensions, this exquisitely crafted and madly inventive novel - a triple-disk, concept-album of a book - is a profound yet propulsive enquiry into the nature of reality - the perfect immersive read for fans of David Mitchell, Emily St. John Mandel, Neil Gaiman and Margaret Atwood.
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I really tried with this one. I could tell the overarching story was fascinating and I wanted to learn more, but Haddon wields violence as a very blunt instrument. It didn't feel measured, used in service to the plot, but rather stuffed in at every opportunity.
And never have I ever come across an author with SUCH an anal fixation. By the third or fourth character subjected to anal r*pe it just got both weird (is it his greatest fear? A long-standing fixation? WHY IS THERE SO MUCH OF IT?) and also stale? Very one-note in a way that cancelled out any of the intrigue I felt about the world building.
I DNF'd about a third of the way through.
