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Maxwell's Demon
Fourteen years after the monumental publication of the international bestseller The Raw Shark Texts, Maxwell's Demon heralds the triumphant return of Granta Best Young British Novelist Steven Hall.
Thomas Quinn is having a hard time. A failed novelist, he's stuck writing short stories and audio scripts for other people's characters. His wife, Imogen, is working on a remote island halfway around the world, and talking to her over the webcam isn't the same. The bills are piling up, the dirty dishes are stacking in the sink, and the whole world seems to be hurtling towards entropic collapse. Then he gets a voicemail from his father, who has been dead for seven years.
Thomas's relationship with Stanley Quinn--a world-famous writer and erstwhile absent father--was always shaky, not least because Stanley always seemed to prefer his enigmatic assistant and protégé Andrew Black to his own son. Yet after Black published his first book, Cupid's Engine, which went on to sell over a million copies, he disappeared completely. Now strange things are happening to Thomas, and he can't help but wonder if Black is tugging at the seams of his world behind the scenes.
Absurdly brilliant, wildly entertaining, and utterly mind-bending, Maxwell's Demon triumphantly excavates the ways we construct meaning in a world where chaotic collapse looms closer every day.
Thomas Quinn is having a hard time. A failed novelist, he's stuck writing short stories and audio scripts for other people's characters. His wife, Imogen, is working on a remote island halfway around the world, and talking to her over the webcam isn't the same. The bills are piling up, the dirty dishes are stacking in the sink, and the whole world seems to be hurtling towards entropic collapse. Then he gets a voicemail from his father, who has been dead for seven years.
Thomas's relationship with Stanley Quinn--a world-famous writer and erstwhile absent father--was always shaky, not least because Stanley always seemed to prefer his enigmatic assistant and protégé Andrew Black to his own son. Yet after Black published his first book, Cupid's Engine, which went on to sell over a million copies, he disappeared completely. Now strange things are happening to Thomas, and he can't help but wonder if Black is tugging at the seams of his world behind the scenes.
Absurdly brilliant, wildly entertaining, and utterly mind-bending, Maxwell's Demon triumphantly excavates the ways we construct meaning in a world where chaotic collapse looms closer every day.
352 pages, Hardcover
First published February 4, 2021
About the author
Steven Hall
8 books551 followersSteven Hall is the author of The Raw Shark Texts and Maxwell's Demon. He is one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists.
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November 14, 2024
I loved reading Maxwell's Demon and listening to the audiobook, and, here's the thing – I loved the novel more each time I reread and relistened since I had a much clearer understanding of what was going on, truly going on, in every scene.
At one point, the tale's narrator, Thomas Quinn, asks someone what he thinks of his novel, The Qwerty Machinegun. Thomas receives the reply: “I can't know anything until I'm at the end, can I?” Perhaps not so coincidentally, this observation also holds true when it comes to Maxwell's Demon, a highly inventive novel where you would be wise to withhold judgement until you've read every single page. Actually, for Maxwell's Demon, it would be advisable to hold off judgement until you've read the entire novel a second time, a reread where, as I noted above, you are given the underlying reality in the closing chapters, revelations turning all preceding events on their head. I acknowledge I'm suggesting a serious commitment to the book, but, I can assure you, the payoff is well worth it. Thank you, Steven Hall; you've written a marvelous novel.
Struggling novelist Thomas Quinn had his first and only novel, something of a dud, published seven years ago. This is most disappointing considering his late father, Dr Stanley Quinn, was among the leading writers of his generation. And wouldn't you know it, his father's protégé, Andrew Black, also published a novel, Cupid's Engine, some years back that proved a rousing international success, selling millions of copies. Thus, we find Thomas on the opening pages in his London flat musing on his plight: stooping to earn tiny amounts of money by occasionally performing as a hack writer for TV shows, his wife, Imogen, engaged in research on far away Easter Island, his unresolved feelings revolving around his father and Andrew Black.
Then it happens, a bizarre phone message from his dead father: 'Why knocks an angel in Bethlehem?'. Not long thereafter, Thomas received a quizzical letter from Andrew Black, of all people. It was his first contact with Black in seven years and included a single Polaroid picture of a dark sphere the size of a baseball with the question: 'What do you think this is?'. And we're off on a postmodern literary thriller touching on all sorts of things: a mysterious second Black novel, the nature creation, personal identity and memory, mythic archetypes, how stories are constructed – Maxwell's Demon is a humdinger that will bring to mind Thomas Pynchon, John Fowles, Philip K. Dick, Jeff Noon, Mark Z. Danielewski.
Since there's so much covered in the book's 332 pages, I'll make an immediate shift to a Maxwell's Demon highlight reel:
Leaves – More than a dozen pages contain words formed into various tree leaves (a nod to Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves, perhaps) on such topics as entropy, Joseph Campbell's Hero With A Thousand Faces and the paradoxes of language. Several additional pages feature symbols and other visual stuff reminding readers they have definitely entered the world of postmodernism, breaks from traditional form that add an undeniable charm to the book.
Thought Experiment – Thomas gives much reflection to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, specifically the way James Clerk Maxwell back in 1850 imagined a microscopic demon opening a trapdoor to let slow-moving (cold) molecules move to the left side of a closed box and fast-moving (hot) molecules move to the right side (the novel includes a number of helpful diagrams for readers to visualize what's going on here). A prime effect of this experiment is to demonstrate how entropy and therefore time can be reversed, which gets back to the novel's unfolding drama filtered through the alembic of Thomas Quinn's increasingly shaken mind.
Letters and Names – Andrew Black and Andrew Black's novel lead Thomas to muse on ancient texts such as the Bible, Gnostic gospels and the Q source. This, in turn, leads Thomas to conjecture various possibilities on the way we perceive letters, words, names, the nature of angles and how all this relates to the very world we inhabit. How much is really out there and how much is a product of our mind and cultural conditioning? These questions are given even more weight as Thomas encounters progressively more strangeness around him.
Second Novel – The thrills of this thriller accelerate when Thomas discovers Andrew Black has written a second novel, Maxwell's Demon. Now we can really chomp into the metafictional muffin, asking ourselves what are the connections between this Black novel with James Clerk Maxwell's demon and the very Steven Hall novel we are reading. Sure, there's a hefty hunk of postmodern zaniness going down here but the British author is keen to point out he still holds a traditional belief in the need for strong characters and stories.
Writers and Readers – Andrew Black has a particular loathing for eBooks and other technologies. It all gets back to what a book is and how a book is read – surely one of the more fascinating aspects of Hall's novel. Likewise, Thomas addresses the connection of writers of novels and readers of novels, pointing out the tricks a novelist can play to change the concept of time and how a novelist can spend two weeks or two years writing a section that a reader can read in ten minutes. In a curious way, these sections can be taken as a meditation on Steven Hall's own commitment to the writer's craft.
Imogen - Thomas reflects: “I've been watching Imogen sleep for most of the morning, through the fuzzy green night vision of Dorm Cam Two. All that time, she'd been lying on her side, facing out, with the duvet pulled up under her chin.” Poor Thomas Quinn. For six months he has been yearning for a physical and emotional nearness to his beautiful wife when all he has is a video feed traveling half way around the globe.
Multiple Levels of Reality – Can you believe Thomas spots Maurice Umber, the main character in Thomas Black's novel, Cupid's Engine, on a street corner? And this is only the beginning. Ah, the interplay of fiction and real life, so called. As if in a tale by Jorge Luis Borges, Thomas Quinn must deal with one level of reality undercutting another, and then another. But through it all, can we say the human heart remains the central pulse in our lives? To answer this question, I urge you to pick up a copy of Maxwell's Demon and give it a good read and reread.
British author Steven Hall, born 1975
February 18, 2021
It has been 14 years since Steven Hall's mind-bending debut, The Raw Shark Texts. A book so inventive and a joy to read, it has often popped into my head since. So to say that his follow-up has been eagerly awaited on my part is an understatement.
Our narrator is Thomas Quinn, an author who is struggling to make ends meet. The death of his father, a famous writer, has been a major blow. But he is also living in the shadow of Andrew Black, his father's protégé, whose only novel Cupid's Engine was a massive bestseller. Plus he is missing his wife Imogen, who is carrying out a science experiment in a distant country. The bills are piling up and the pressure is starting to build on Thomas. But then he a receives a mysterious letter from Black, which includes a photo of a strange dark sphere. He sees a person who looks like the main character of Cupid's Engine on the street, and hears a message from his father on his answering machine. What could it all mean?
I still don't know if I fully understand what happened in this story. After an intriguing start, the plot becomes quite chaotic. Thomas digresses into scientific theory, with entropy becoming an important theme. He begins to ponder philosophical questions and consider the power of words. The typography of the text changes into different shapes, like leaves for example. It's all very meta. For me, it was fun trying to connect the dots, but others might find it exasperating. My main criticism is that I didn't form any kind of attachment to Thomas or the other characters, so I wasn't really invested in their fate. All in all, it wasn't quite as satisfying a read as The Raw Shark Texts, but I enjoyed it all same. If you're in the mood for something a little more experimental, give this one a try.
Our narrator is Thomas Quinn, an author who is struggling to make ends meet. The death of his father, a famous writer, has been a major blow. But he is also living in the shadow of Andrew Black, his father's protégé, whose only novel Cupid's Engine was a massive bestseller. Plus he is missing his wife Imogen, who is carrying out a science experiment in a distant country. The bills are piling up and the pressure is starting to build on Thomas. But then he a receives a mysterious letter from Black, which includes a photo of a strange dark sphere. He sees a person who looks like the main character of Cupid's Engine on the street, and hears a message from his father on his answering machine. What could it all mean?
I still don't know if I fully understand what happened in this story. After an intriguing start, the plot becomes quite chaotic. Thomas digresses into scientific theory, with entropy becoming an important theme. He begins to ponder philosophical questions and consider the power of words. The typography of the text changes into different shapes, like leaves for example. It's all very meta. For me, it was fun trying to connect the dots, but others might find it exasperating. My main criticism is that I didn't form any kind of attachment to Thomas or the other characters, so I wasn't really invested in their fate. All in all, it wasn't quite as satisfying a read as The Raw Shark Texts, but I enjoyed it all same. If you're in the mood for something a little more experimental, give this one a try.
May 10, 2021
Thomas Quinn is a writer who has not achieved the acclaim of his dead father Stanley or the huge success of his father’s protégé, Andrew Black. Andrew stopped writing and shrank from the publisher eye after a contractual dispute with his publisher. Now, 7 years after Stanley’s death, Andrew sends Thomas an enigmatic letter that lures him into a mystery that becomes increasingly surreal.
I wish that I could tell you what happens in this book, but by the end I had absolutely no idea what was going on. I did really enjoy the journey though. It’s a trip through various scientific experiments, the work of Joseph Campbell, bee dances, the value of the written word and the lost Gospels. The writing was excellent and the plot certainly held my interest, even when I was totally lost. I think it helped that I listened to the audiobook narrated by Piers Hampton. He has a wonderful voice and did a great job with the characters, atmosphere and pacing. I suggest giving this book a try if you are interested in having a different reading experience and don’t mind if your brain explodes a little.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.
I wish that I could tell you what happens in this book, but by the end I had absolutely no idea what was going on. I did really enjoy the journey though. It’s a trip through various scientific experiments, the work of Joseph Campbell, bee dances, the value of the written word and the lost Gospels. The writing was excellent and the plot certainly held my interest, even when I was totally lost. I think it helped that I listened to the audiobook narrated by Piers Hampton. He has a wonderful voice and did a great job with the characters, atmosphere and pacing. I suggest giving this book a try if you are interested in having a different reading experience and don’t mind if your brain explodes a little.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.
January 23, 2021
What is the world made of, do you think, when you really look at it? Is it rocks and trees and rivers, or is it letters and emails and questions and wants? Do our questions make the universe? If it goes unobserved, does the universe even exist, or is it like a story in a book, a story that needs a reader’s eye moving over the letters to bring order and meaning, to cause the wave to collapse into a particle? Do these dark waters have to be seen and sorted by a Maxwell’s Demon, by a God dividing night from day, heaven from earth, to make a something from a nothing?
The first-person narrator of Maxwell’s Demon is Thomas Quinn, in his early thirties and (in his own words) a failed author. He is son of a bibliophile mother and, a largely absent, famous war correspondent father, both now deceased:
Dr Stanley Quinn was a man of letters; a man of words set and struck with firm conviction, a man who’d built himself from clattering keys and spooling ribbon– and a firm yank on his own bootstraps– to become the greatest poet, journalist and war correspondent of his generation.
While Thomas’s old debut novel sunk without trace, his father’s protégé was to enjoy much greater, best selling success, with a 1000 page erudite mystery novel:
Just beyond The Qwerty Machinegun, standing behind my own first novel like the Empire State Building stands behind that little church in New York, is another first novel - Cupid’s Engine.
...
Cupid’s Engine begins with a tall, scruffy man in a white fedora and crumpled, linen suit. He’s propping himself up in a doorway, covered in blood. Although we don’t know it yet, this man’s name is Maurice Umber. He has a bloody knife in his right hand, and a telephone receiver pressed to his left ear. ‘ Police,’
...
No details about Andrew Black were available at the book’s publication; nobody talked to Black, nobody met Black, and that remains the case, even to this day. Conspiracy theories, hoaxes, blurry author photos and doctored documents all did the rounds and were debunked and dismissed in turn.
Indeed the only thing known publicly about Andrew Black is that he was under the wing of Dr Stanley Quinn. Thomas didn’t meet the author while his father was alive, but was to do so later, when Black revealed himself to Thomas as an eccentric lecturer in literature at The University of Hull (as all Blackadder fans know, second only to Cambridge as a great British university), and the two formed a bond, albeit one that could not be exactly called a friendship: no, not friends, not even something adjacent to friends really, but it seemed to me that we were drawn together.
Then Black vanished, failing to fulfil a mega-book deal, for which he’d been paid in advance, and leaving behind a rather embittered literary agent, Sophie,who also acts for Thomas:
Almost every time I saw her, Sophie’s little black book would make an appearance, its pages holding the specifics of some new story, a new set of names, dates and technical terms that she’d keep referring back to while telling me something remarkable.
As Maxwell’s Demon opens, Thomas is living on his own, while his wife carries out research on the other side of the world on a very remote island, where she believed that the single most important act in the entire history of humanity might have taken place. He now writes professional fan-fiction, commissioned to add new books to classic TV series such as Stargate.
Then two strange things happen - Thomas receives a cryptic answerphone message (the call mysteriously untraceable and the voice message instantly erased after listening) which seems to be from his deceased father, and he receives a short, and equally cryptic, letter from Andrew Black.
My review above may be rather exposition heavy but is really just the basic set-up of the story. And the heavy exposition is rather representative of the novel, where the narrator follows Sophie’s approach, including relaying in detail various of her stories, so we for example get re-told the well-known tale of how the Nook e-reader replaced all the instances of ‘kindle’ with ‘nook’ in War and Peace.
And the narrator muses on, and discusses in some details, theological concerns such as why an ox always appears in nativity scenes, or an explanation of the thought experiment on the Second Law of Dynamics, Maxwell’s Demon, entropy being a key theme to the novel:
Everyone knows this happens to old houses because they’ve seen it– uncared-for structures fall into disrepair and eventually collapse. This is common sense. Why it happens is simple: because there are countless billions of messy situations for all the things that make up the house– bricks, beams, nails, lintels, joists and all their atoms– to be in, any of which would cause it to fall down, and only a handful of neat situations where the house stays standing. This ever-increasing movement towards messiness is called entropy.
This all makes for an entertaining read, although at times the detail crosses into Googledumping (I could look up the Nook/Kindle story myself if I didn’t know it) and narratorsplaining (his take on Maxwell’s Demon or the different sources of the Gospels are rather simplified and occasionally naive). Not that the author and narrator aren’t aware of this - it’s all done rather postmodern ironically (including some explicit nods to Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons, although rather poking fun at his books) but that doesn’t change the reading experience.
To the best of my knowledge, the different elements I’m going to lay out below are correct, though I don’t pretend to be an expert and it’s possible I’ve misunderstood something along the way, although I don’t think so. Nevertheless, I’d encourage you to spend a little time jumping online and checking out my findings for yourself. I suspect, when you hear what I’ve got to say, you probably will.
I spent nearly two straight hours on the train to Hull, googling cherubim and following my searches down some very dense and strange pathways indeed. Here’s what I found ...
The plot that follows gets increasingly tangled, quasi-religious, metaphysical and metafictional, and I wasn’t entirely convinced it all held together, but then perhaps that’s not really the point. The book also contains some typographical innovation (except this felt rather sub-House of Leaves and perhaps a deliberate tribute to that book) with parts of the text written in spirals and other patterns, albeit used rather sparingly and incidentally.
Overall this was a very enjoyable page-turner with some baked-in intellectual stimulation. But perhaps not as innovative or as thought-provoking as intended, feeling something of a mash-up of ground well-trodden by Eco, Knausgaard and Mulisch amongst others.
Thanks to the publisher via Netgalley for the ARC. 3.5 stars.
The first-person narrator of Maxwell’s Demon is Thomas Quinn, in his early thirties and (in his own words) a failed author. He is son of a bibliophile mother and, a largely absent, famous war correspondent father, both now deceased:
Dr Stanley Quinn was a man of letters; a man of words set and struck with firm conviction, a man who’d built himself from clattering keys and spooling ribbon– and a firm yank on his own bootstraps– to become the greatest poet, journalist and war correspondent of his generation.
While Thomas’s old debut novel sunk without trace, his father’s protégé was to enjoy much greater, best selling success, with a 1000 page erudite mystery novel:
Just beyond The Qwerty Machinegun, standing behind my own first novel like the Empire State Building stands behind that little church in New York, is another first novel - Cupid’s Engine.
...
Cupid’s Engine begins with a tall, scruffy man in a white fedora and crumpled, linen suit. He’s propping himself up in a doorway, covered in blood. Although we don’t know it yet, this man’s name is Maurice Umber. He has a bloody knife in his right hand, and a telephone receiver pressed to his left ear. ‘ Police,’
...
No details about Andrew Black were available at the book’s publication; nobody talked to Black, nobody met Black, and that remains the case, even to this day. Conspiracy theories, hoaxes, blurry author photos and doctored documents all did the rounds and were debunked and dismissed in turn.
Indeed the only thing known publicly about Andrew Black is that he was under the wing of Dr Stanley Quinn. Thomas didn’t meet the author while his father was alive, but was to do so later, when Black revealed himself to Thomas as an eccentric lecturer in literature at The University of Hull (as all Blackadder fans know, second only to Cambridge as a great British university), and the two formed a bond, albeit one that could not be exactly called a friendship: no, not friends, not even something adjacent to friends really, but it seemed to me that we were drawn together.
Then Black vanished, failing to fulfil a mega-book deal, for which he’d been paid in advance, and leaving behind a rather embittered literary agent, Sophie,who also acts for Thomas:
Almost every time I saw her, Sophie’s little black book would make an appearance, its pages holding the specifics of some new story, a new set of names, dates and technical terms that she’d keep referring back to while telling me something remarkable.
As Maxwell’s Demon opens, Thomas is living on his own, while his wife carries out research on the other side of the world on a very remote island, where she believed that the single most important act in the entire history of humanity might have taken place. He now writes professional fan-fiction, commissioned to add new books to classic TV series such as Stargate.
Then two strange things happen - Thomas receives a cryptic answerphone message (the call mysteriously untraceable and the voice message instantly erased after listening) which seems to be from his deceased father, and he receives a short, and equally cryptic, letter from Andrew Black.
My review above may be rather exposition heavy but is really just the basic set-up of the story. And the heavy exposition is rather representative of the novel, where the narrator follows Sophie’s approach, including relaying in detail various of her stories, so we for example get re-told the well-known tale of how the Nook e-reader replaced all the instances of ‘kindle’ with ‘nook’ in War and Peace.
And the narrator muses on, and discusses in some details, theological concerns such as why an ox always appears in nativity scenes, or an explanation of the thought experiment on the Second Law of Dynamics, Maxwell’s Demon, entropy being a key theme to the novel:
Everyone knows this happens to old houses because they’ve seen it– uncared-for structures fall into disrepair and eventually collapse. This is common sense. Why it happens is simple: because there are countless billions of messy situations for all the things that make up the house– bricks, beams, nails, lintels, joists and all their atoms– to be in, any of which would cause it to fall down, and only a handful of neat situations where the house stays standing. This ever-increasing movement towards messiness is called entropy.
This all makes for an entertaining read, although at times the detail crosses into Googledumping (I could look up the Nook/Kindle story myself if I didn’t know it) and narratorsplaining (his take on Maxwell’s Demon or the different sources of the Gospels are rather simplified and occasionally naive). Not that the author and narrator aren’t aware of this - it’s all done rather postmodern ironically (including some explicit nods to Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons, although rather poking fun at his books) but that doesn’t change the reading experience.
To the best of my knowledge, the different elements I’m going to lay out below are correct, though I don’t pretend to be an expert and it’s possible I’ve misunderstood something along the way, although I don’t think so. Nevertheless, I’d encourage you to spend a little time jumping online and checking out my findings for yourself. I suspect, when you hear what I’ve got to say, you probably will.
I spent nearly two straight hours on the train to Hull, googling cherubim and following my searches down some very dense and strange pathways indeed. Here’s what I found ...
The plot that follows gets increasingly tangled, quasi-religious, metaphysical and metafictional, and I wasn’t entirely convinced it all held together, but then perhaps that’s not really the point. The book also contains some typographical innovation (except this felt rather sub-House of Leaves and perhaps a deliberate tribute to that book) with parts of the text written in spirals and other patterns, albeit used rather sparingly and incidentally.
Overall this was a very enjoyable page-turner with some baked-in intellectual stimulation. But perhaps not as innovative or as thought-provoking as intended, feeling something of a mash-up of ground well-trodden by Eco, Knausgaard and Mulisch amongst others.
Thanks to the publisher via Netgalley for the ARC. 3.5 stars.
June 15, 2024
Order vs. chaos/entropy. Keep order, thus keeping chaos and entropy at bay. How to keep order, hmm, maybe by making good use of words, naming things well. This is where I get thoroughly lost because, for me, words remain words whether they are on paper or on an e-book. I really could not understand why the abhorrence for e-books.
Hall writes well. In fact, he kept me there. His book is chaotic and twisty and he uses his words to create some sort of order and this is where it became problematic for me because in the course of the twists and turns, of words used to say this and then say that, I lost meaning and I'm left with unresolved confusion. What happened and what he wanted the final message to be got lost in the words. The glimpse of explanation I saw at the end left me like Iota flying in the face of God, in this case Hall, shouting a much confused why?
An ARC gently provided by publisher/author via Netgalley.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/202...
Hall writes well. In fact, he kept me there. His book is chaotic and twisty and he uses his words to create some sort of order and this is where it became problematic for me because in the course of the twists and turns, of words used to say this and then say that, I lost meaning and I'm left with unresolved confusion. What happened and what he wanted the final message to be got lost in the words. The glimpse of explanation I saw at the end left me like Iota flying in the face of God, in this case Hall, shouting a much confused why?
An ARC gently provided by publisher/author via Netgalley.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/202...
January 17, 2021
4,5
Whoah, this was one hell of a novel! Books, writing, mystery. The Bible, the ox, the angel. The world, chaos, entropy. Hall imaginatively and cleverly mixes narratives in a surreal and wonderful way. Some people may find it messy and too much of a struggle (it can be at times) but I absolutely loved it! So much fun :-).
Thank you Canongate and Netgalley for the ARC.
Whoah, this was one hell of a novel! Books, writing, mystery. The Bible, the ox, the angel. The world, chaos, entropy. Hall imaginatively and cleverly mixes narratives in a surreal and wonderful way. Some people may find it messy and too much of a struggle (it can be at times) but I absolutely loved it! So much fun :-).
Thank you Canongate and Netgalley for the ARC.
April 13, 2021
I should get a reward for actually finishing this meta-fiction, metaphysics, metacrap by this wannabe-Auster. It sometimes felt like a child (not yours, but a stranger's) is creeping up on you in the playground while you're enjoying watching your own kin, starting a story, making it up on the spot: "and then I got hit by a bus and then a pigeon flew over and called me names and then my dead grandmother came out of a Tesla and then God pointed the finger at her and then and then..." On and on and on.
It was pseudo where it wanted to sound scientific.
Pop where it wanted to look punk and cult.
Tedious where it should have been thrilling.
Couldn't care less where the mystery should have evoked fascination.
A mediocre B-movie where it was clearly aiming at Charlie Kaufmann territory.
Messed up quicksand where it should have been a fun labyrinth.
Two stars when it actually could have gone for five
It was pseudo where it wanted to sound scientific.
Pop where it wanted to look punk and cult.
Tedious where it should have been thrilling.
Couldn't care less where the mystery should have evoked fascination.
A mediocre B-movie where it was clearly aiming at Charlie Kaufmann territory.
Messed up quicksand where it should have been a fun labyrinth.
Two stars when it actually could have gone for five
Shelved as 'dnf'
May 4, 2021DNF @50ish%
This started off intriguing, but then just got...weird. 🤷🏻♀️ It wasn't holding my interest, so I am throwing in the towel. Can't love them all, right?
**ARC Via NetGalley**
This started off intriguing, but then just got...weird. 🤷🏻♀️ It wasn't holding my interest, so I am throwing in the towel. Can't love them all, right?
**ARC Via NetGalley**
April 2, 2021
Starts off with the device of a metaphysical telephone call as per The New York Trilogy, then proceeds to channel The Truman Show, Tom McCarthy's Remainder, Scarlet Thomas' The End of Mr. Y and Christopher Priest's The Affirmation without improving or adding anything to the mix and the ending was frankly the weakest of all possible outcomes that up to that point he had skilfully kept open. I was also not a little troubled by what turned out to be the central (visual) metaphor which I can't talk about for spoilers, but it seemed a gross transgression on gender tropes.
There wee interesting musings on materialism vs idealism, entropy and the power of naming and language itself t render the world or to actually create it, but ultimately these were relegated to devices to advance the level of the plot rather than having weight in and of themselves. Ultimately it was a book about books and writing books (and writer's block in this case) which I always find a touch indulgent.
I wasn't convinced that he pulled this off even though I was rooting for the book till about 2/3rds of the way through. I also couldn't see the point of the visual word pictures, unlike the visuals in The Raw Shark Texts. Here they seemed, yes, another indulgence.
Video review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLojA...
There wee interesting musings on materialism vs idealism, entropy and the power of naming and language itself t render the world or to actually create it, but ultimately these were relegated to devices to advance the level of the plot rather than having weight in and of themselves. Ultimately it was a book about books and writing books (and writer's block in this case) which I always find a touch indulgent.
I wasn't convinced that he pulled this off even though I was rooting for the book till about 2/3rds of the way through. I also couldn't see the point of the visual word pictures, unlike the visuals in The Raw Shark Texts. Here they seemed, yes, another indulgence.
Video review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLojA...
July 23, 2021
3.5 stars
Perhaps more important than the mystery at the heart of “Maxwell's Demon” is the skillfully crafted feeling of perplexity. It was engaging and bizarre, with brilliantly shifting points of view, and a seemingly unraveling mind of our protagonist, Thomas Quinn.
Not a casual read, but rewarding for those who enjoy novels that plays more like an existential puzzle than a traditional narrative.
Perhaps more important than the mystery at the heart of “Maxwell's Demon” is the skillfully crafted feeling of perplexity. It was engaging and bizarre, with brilliantly shifting points of view, and a seemingly unraveling mind of our protagonist, Thomas Quinn.
Not a casual read, but rewarding for those who enjoy novels that plays more like an existential puzzle than a traditional narrative.
January 31, 2021
Judged solely on the book's own backstory, this second novel by Somerset Maugham Award winner Steven Hall carries many warning signs. The author took more than 13 years from his debut to launch this second work. Maxwell's Demon deals with a meta-story of sorts of a failed author trying to dream up a second novel, and becoming lost in several types of obsessions. And the novel confronts topics that would be considered by many, particularly sci-fi and speculative fiction fans, to be well-worn: the Second Law of Thermodynamics, entropy, and the role of (James Clerk) Maxwell's Demon; the Gnostic Gospels, the Apocrypha, and the Q source for the standard gospels; the power of words to bring reality into existence - you get the picture.
I'll be the first to admit that, mid-way through the book, I was raising my eyebrows and saying "Oh, really?" Yet something about the narrative line urged me to keep going. I wasn't distracted by text crafted into sycamore and chestnut leaves, because authors like Mark Danielewski and Nicole Galland have asked us to go much further in font and graphic manipulation than Hall asks us. If you give up on the novel based solely on the occasionally wild graphics, you have a pretty limited idea of a linear story line.
It's clear that the mysterious novelist Andrew Black, whom the protagonist's father admired far more than his own son, displays not just a magnetic attraction that our hero Thomas Quinn can't resist, but also a streak of petulant weirdness that keeps him from producing a second novel for reasons that are far less legitimate than Quinn's own. Hey, we can all believe that e-books and hyperlinks can bring about an apocalypse in a figurative sense, without messing up our lives tremendously in order to go on some anti-apocalypse crusade. (Disclaimer: I'm on my own anti-apocalypse mission, attempting to listen to all ~10,000 pieces of recorded music I own, under the auspices of the Alphabetical Apocalypse Record Project, before the impending doom of the human race hits, but I can't get too flustered by things like accelerated global warming or the Jan. 6 riots, or I'd never get anything done! ) So we're doomed. C'est la vie, hold my beer, we can still have a rollicking good time, right? Don't ask Andrew Black when he's building his dollhouses!
As a result, many readers, including those who already favor speculative fiction and dystopian plots, may reach the halfway point and think "This is certainly going to be a train wreck," only to find that Hall manages to pull a nice mystery out of all the navel-gazing. Is Thomas Quinn finally succumbing to a paranoid-schizophrenic episode that will leave him lost in an Andrew Black rabbit hole forever, or is there really a conspiracy far deeper than we realize, mirroring those in Black's own fiction? I won't give you any spoilers here, except to say that the plot twists may not be utterly unpredictable, but at a level one would scarcely expect.
And I'm pleased to say that the book offers a happy ending of sorts, featuring the type of anti-entropic Maxwell's Demon which we've learned to expect in some novels, yet which is a worthy way forward as the human race falls into its own rabbit hole. So, yeah, I ended up liking this novel despite my misgivings. But I still feel like the high school teacher who holds out little hope for the class-skipping dilettante (one who managed to be named one of Granta's best young British novelists in 2013), but is surprised when the class clown comes up with a 4.0 essay at the last minute. Bravo, Steven Hall, you managed to pull a Thomas Quinn and Andrew Black after all. For next time, remember Luke's scriptural line about "for whom much is given, much more is expected," and we'll be good for the next work.
I'll be the first to admit that, mid-way through the book, I was raising my eyebrows and saying "Oh, really?" Yet something about the narrative line urged me to keep going. I wasn't distracted by text crafted into sycamore and chestnut leaves, because authors like Mark Danielewski and Nicole Galland have asked us to go much further in font and graphic manipulation than Hall asks us. If you give up on the novel based solely on the occasionally wild graphics, you have a pretty limited idea of a linear story line.
It's clear that the mysterious novelist Andrew Black, whom the protagonist's father admired far more than his own son, displays not just a magnetic attraction that our hero Thomas Quinn can't resist, but also a streak of petulant weirdness that keeps him from producing a second novel for reasons that are far less legitimate than Quinn's own. Hey, we can all believe that e-books and hyperlinks can bring about an apocalypse in a figurative sense, without messing up our lives tremendously in order to go on some anti-apocalypse crusade. (Disclaimer: I'm on my own anti-apocalypse mission, attempting to listen to all ~10,000 pieces of recorded music I own, under the auspices of the Alphabetical Apocalypse Record Project, before the impending doom of the human race hits, but I can't get too flustered by things like accelerated global warming or the Jan. 6 riots, or I'd never get anything done! ) So we're doomed. C'est la vie, hold my beer, we can still have a rollicking good time, right? Don't ask Andrew Black when he's building his dollhouses!
As a result, many readers, including those who already favor speculative fiction and dystopian plots, may reach the halfway point and think "This is certainly going to be a train wreck," only to find that Hall manages to pull a nice mystery out of all the navel-gazing. Is Thomas Quinn finally succumbing to a paranoid-schizophrenic episode that will leave him lost in an Andrew Black rabbit hole forever, or is there really a conspiracy far deeper than we realize, mirroring those in Black's own fiction? I won't give you any spoilers here, except to say that the plot twists may not be utterly unpredictable, but at a level one would scarcely expect.
And I'm pleased to say that the book offers a happy ending of sorts, featuring the type of anti-entropic Maxwell's Demon which we've learned to expect in some novels, yet which is a worthy way forward as the human race falls into its own rabbit hole. So, yeah, I ended up liking this novel despite my misgivings. But I still feel like the high school teacher who holds out little hope for the class-skipping dilettante (one who managed to be named one of Granta's best young British novelists in 2013), but is surprised when the class clown comes up with a 4.0 essay at the last minute. Bravo, Steven Hall, you managed to pull a Thomas Quinn and Andrew Black after all. For next time, remember Luke's scriptural line about "for whom much is given, much more is expected," and we'll be good for the next work.
February 4, 2021
Steven Hall returns with his most mind-bending novel yet and an avant-grade part fantasy part mystery-thriller. Thomas Quinn is having a hard time. A failed novelist, he’s stuck writing short stories and audio scripts for other people’s characters. His wife, Imogen, is working on a remote island halfway around the world, and talking to her over the webcam isn’t the same. The bills are piling up, the dirty dishes are stacking in the sink, and the whole world seems to be hurtling towards entropic collapse. Then he gets a voicemail from his father, who has been dead for seven years. Thomas’s relationship with Stanley Quinn―a world-famous writer and erstwhile absent father―was always shaky, not least because Stanley always seemed to prefer his enigmatic assistant and protégé Andrew Black to his own son. Yet after Black published his first book, Cupid’s Engine, which went on to sell over a million copies, he disappeared completely. Now strange things are happening to Thomas, and he can’t help but wonder if Black is tugging at the seams of his world behind the scenes.
One of the most exhilarating genre-bending books I've encountered of late, this is a surreal, exciting and utterly original tale and a welcome and much-needed relief from the outside world at present. Hall is a masterful storyteller - he just has a way with words that allows him to talk about the most mundane and quotidian of subjects while making them sound fascinating - much like the inimitable Haruki Murakami. The prose so faultless and simply flies by, as do the pages, and the plot ponders over deep philosophical questions and the way in which we humans handle adversity and pandemonium in a way that allows us to carry on breathing, living and making sense of it all. If you enjoy off-the-wall novels with layer after layer to them much like a set of Russian Matryoshka dolls and a rich, charismatic cast of characters you will likely find much to love within Maxwell's Demon. Absurdly brilliant, wildly entertaining, and utterly mind-bending, this offbeat novel triumphantly excavates the ways we construct meaning in a world where chaotic collapse looms closer every day. Highly recommended.
One of the most exhilarating genre-bending books I've encountered of late, this is a surreal, exciting and utterly original tale and a welcome and much-needed relief from the outside world at present. Hall is a masterful storyteller - he just has a way with words that allows him to talk about the most mundane and quotidian of subjects while making them sound fascinating - much like the inimitable Haruki Murakami. The prose so faultless and simply flies by, as do the pages, and the plot ponders over deep philosophical questions and the way in which we humans handle adversity and pandemonium in a way that allows us to carry on breathing, living and making sense of it all. If you enjoy off-the-wall novels with layer after layer to them much like a set of Russian Matryoshka dolls and a rich, charismatic cast of characters you will likely find much to love within Maxwell's Demon. Absurdly brilliant, wildly entertaining, and utterly mind-bending, this offbeat novel triumphantly excavates the ways we construct meaning in a world where chaotic collapse looms closer every day. Highly recommended.
December 11, 2020
I have been waiting a long time for a second novel from Steven Hall. I’m happy to report that fans of The Raw Shark Texts will dig this just as much. It’s playful, imaginative and oh so twisty, springing about all over the place from father-son relationships to entropy, angels and the real nature of the alphabet. There’s a strong narrative throughline alongside the philosophical enquiry and physics lessons, and I kept turning the (virtual) pages in a classic ‘one more bit before I turn out the light’ style. A very good read, and I hope his next book comes along a little quicker.
December 11, 2021
Actually got a headache from reading the ending
November 17, 2022
Let me just put it this way: I read this book all in one go. So there’s zero chance I missed anything or forgot details or whatever. And when you read a book like that and the first thing you do upon finishing is Google “Maxwell’s Demon explain what happened,” something has gone awry.
I loved Raw Shark Texts, which was a wild ride and very meta and all, but this one just falls apart about 4/5 of the way through, even going so far as having one of the characters say, to another character who is a stand-in for the reader, that they can’t explain everything.
Or, hear me out, you could. Because it’s a book with made-up shit in it. Nothing is inexplicable in fiction because everything has, at the very least, the explanation of why it was written.
I just don’t get this one. I don’t get the love from readers who, after reading their reviews and seeing they were also confused, said they enjoyed an experience that was, to me, akin to “it was all a dream.”
Now, sometimes it's the reader's fault. If I was hating this 25 pages in and forged on, that's on me. BUT, this book is set up, sort of like Raw Shark Texts, where the reader is made to hope/expect that things are confusing in the moment, but will wrap up nicely.
I'm trying to think of movie equivalents...maybe Memento. You know how Memento is based on the idea that things are confusing, but you will be given an explanation? Or Jordan Peele's US. LOTS of weird crap is happening, and although the explanation has some holes in it if you think about it too hard, you at least feel confident that you understand, basically, what's going on by the end.
Both of these movies have something in common, which is that the stories are incredibly weird and confusing, but the storytelling is compelling enough to propel you through to the promise of an ending that is satisfying.
Some stories, like US and Memento, are building to an ending. They're a maze, and the promise of "solving" the movie is what keeps you going. When stories like this have endings that don't work, the maze collapses behind you.
Maxwell's Demon read like this to me, a maze of a narrative that falls apart.
Maxwell's Demon's ending was almost there, close enough to make the reader feel like the problem was them, not the book. "You didn't get it, you're probably not smart enough," is not only the feeling you're left with, it's said to your avatar character in the book, the narrator who the reader is meant to identify with.
I don't like that. Because, as is the case with most readers, I don't like being made to feel stupid. But more than that, I disagree with the premise that a reader is to blame when they don't understand the basic plot.
Yes, sure, in some cases, stories are complicated. And if I read Maxwell's Demon with the TV on or on an airplane or some shit, I'd be more generous in assuming there were things I missed.
But I think I gave it as close a reading as is possible, and I was still pretty lost.
My younger brother was involved in some kind of chemical engineering project, and he was excited to tell me about it. I told him, "Okay, but just so you know, I probably won't get it." And he said, "If I can't explain it so you understand it, that's my fault, not yours." That's kind of how I feel about storytelling: the purpose of storytelling is to take thoughts and ideas and transform them into something people can understand. The challenge of storytelling is taking incomprehensible feelings and fears and ideas and turning them into something that feel real.
Maxwell's Demon seems to go the opposite direction: turning something very real into something intangible and untouchable. And I'm skating dangerously close to talking myself into, "And that's the real genius of it!" but I'm not going to let me persuade myself that way.
Let's talk a little about the formatting as well.
This book seems to have something to say about ebooks and how they're sort of ruining things, and I can get behind that, but it's a thread that's mostly dropped. It seems like there's a point about how ebooks are infinitely edit-able through time, and this is bad, but the message of the book is also about creating your own narrative, so...I'm not sure I get the difference between promotion of creating your own narrative and condemnation of editing the existing narratives, but whatever.
That said, this book would be kind of difficult to read in electronic format, and I can dig it. Creating books that don't work well electronically is a good idea, if you can get a publisher to jump on, just so long as everyone going in knows that they absolutely shouldn't buy the electronic version.
Raw Shark Texts did some interesting things with the arrangement of text on the page, of sizes and shapes of letters and words. It worked with the narrative, and I'm game.
Maxwell's Demon does the same thing, but it felt more gimmicky this time. It's sparse, and it doesn't serve much purpose, but more than that, it was deployed in an annoying way. Allow me to explain.
We get several text asides, like footnotes, written out in the shape of leaves. Okay, fine. I don't mind looking silly and turning a book upside down and so on. Silly is my general aesthetic, so this doesn't throw me off my game whatsoever.
We get these leaves here and there, and then, at some point we get an EXTREMELY tiny leaf, the font is totally unreadable (I just so happened to have visited the eye doctor 3 days ago and have perfectly corrected vision, thank you very much).
Because this leaf is SO small, all I could think to do was grab my phone and use the camera as a magnifying glass. Which worked, I was able to read the text. BUT, it forced me to grab my phone and resist looking at texts and other shit, which seems to be antithetical to the purpose of the book, and I found that odd.
THEN, you turn the page. This is important, you turn the page, the next leaf isn't on the facing page, it's on the NEXT page, and it's the same leaf I just read, much larger this time. Totally read-able.
THEN, on the following page, you're informed that the leaf has struck the narrator in the face.
So, what we were seeing, through this visualization, is a leaf being blown straight at the narrator, gets closer, then hits him in the face. Which is totally fine, BUT, because there was NO WAY to know that I'd get the same leaf, in read-able size, on the next page, I went through the exercise of getting a phone and magnifying and doing all this shit unnecessarily.
And this, my friends, is where I part ways with the charms of books with unique layouts.
I'm a House of Leaves fan, it's a little gimmicky, but overall, it works, and it adds something to the story. It's rarely frustrating, just more...an unusual experience. Author Mark Z. Danielewski described it as climbing a mountain, you can see the top, you can see a couple different ways to get there, and you sort of pick your way along the route that looks best to you. And that makes sense.
Raw Shark Texts, same deal.
Maxwell's Demon felt, to me, like climbing a mountain, you see a trail sign that's in teeny, tiny letters, so you pull out your phone, even though the point of being in nature was to get away from shit, dismiss a couple notifications, check work email really quick, magnify the text, see that it's mildly helpful, then walk on, turn the corner, and find another sign with the same info, but in a font that is read-able by humans.
If the idea was to send readers running for their phones, I would be entertained. I mean, if the narrative leaned into that portion, the battle of electronic convenience and other joys, that'd work great. But that storyline, being almost entirely abandoned, doesn't feel like the motivation here. It feels like this was just an accident, a happenstance of printing that the repeated leaf is on a non-facing page (and is, I believe, the first repeated leaf, something that happens more later but not before this).
A minor annoyance, and, to me, a bad use of the technique of concrete poetry footnotes, let's call them, that lend credence to the argument that this sort of thing is just a gag, a gimmick.
I loved Raw Shark Texts, which was a wild ride and very meta and all, but this one just falls apart about 4/5 of the way through, even going so far as having one of the characters say, to another character who is a stand-in for the reader, that they can’t explain everything.
Or, hear me out, you could. Because it’s a book with made-up shit in it. Nothing is inexplicable in fiction because everything has, at the very least, the explanation of why it was written.
I just don’t get this one. I don’t get the love from readers who, after reading their reviews and seeing they were also confused, said they enjoyed an experience that was, to me, akin to “it was all a dream.”
Now, sometimes it's the reader's fault. If I was hating this 25 pages in and forged on, that's on me. BUT, this book is set up, sort of like Raw Shark Texts, where the reader is made to hope/expect that things are confusing in the moment, but will wrap up nicely.
I'm trying to think of movie equivalents...maybe Memento. You know how Memento is based on the idea that things are confusing, but you will be given an explanation? Or Jordan Peele's US. LOTS of weird crap is happening, and although the explanation has some holes in it if you think about it too hard, you at least feel confident that you understand, basically, what's going on by the end.
Both of these movies have something in common, which is that the stories are incredibly weird and confusing, but the storytelling is compelling enough to propel you through to the promise of an ending that is satisfying.
Some stories, like US and Memento, are building to an ending. They're a maze, and the promise of "solving" the movie is what keeps you going. When stories like this have endings that don't work, the maze collapses behind you.
Maxwell's Demon read like this to me, a maze of a narrative that falls apart.
Maxwell's Demon's ending was almost there, close enough to make the reader feel like the problem was them, not the book. "You didn't get it, you're probably not smart enough," is not only the feeling you're left with, it's said to your avatar character in the book, the narrator who the reader is meant to identify with.
I don't like that. Because, as is the case with most readers, I don't like being made to feel stupid. But more than that, I disagree with the premise that a reader is to blame when they don't understand the basic plot.
Yes, sure, in some cases, stories are complicated. And if I read Maxwell's Demon with the TV on or on an airplane or some shit, I'd be more generous in assuming there were things I missed.
But I think I gave it as close a reading as is possible, and I was still pretty lost.
My younger brother was involved in some kind of chemical engineering project, and he was excited to tell me about it. I told him, "Okay, but just so you know, I probably won't get it." And he said, "If I can't explain it so you understand it, that's my fault, not yours." That's kind of how I feel about storytelling: the purpose of storytelling is to take thoughts and ideas and transform them into something people can understand. The challenge of storytelling is taking incomprehensible feelings and fears and ideas and turning them into something that feel real.
Maxwell's Demon seems to go the opposite direction: turning something very real into something intangible and untouchable. And I'm skating dangerously close to talking myself into, "And that's the real genius of it!" but I'm not going to let me persuade myself that way.
Let's talk a little about the formatting as well.
This book seems to have something to say about ebooks and how they're sort of ruining things, and I can get behind that, but it's a thread that's mostly dropped. It seems like there's a point about how ebooks are infinitely edit-able through time, and this is bad, but the message of the book is also about creating your own narrative, so...I'm not sure I get the difference between promotion of creating your own narrative and condemnation of editing the existing narratives, but whatever.
That said, this book would be kind of difficult to read in electronic format, and I can dig it. Creating books that don't work well electronically is a good idea, if you can get a publisher to jump on, just so long as everyone going in knows that they absolutely shouldn't buy the electronic version.
Raw Shark Texts did some interesting things with the arrangement of text on the page, of sizes and shapes of letters and words. It worked with the narrative, and I'm game.
Maxwell's Demon does the same thing, but it felt more gimmicky this time. It's sparse, and it doesn't serve much purpose, but more than that, it was deployed in an annoying way. Allow me to explain.
We get several text asides, like footnotes, written out in the shape of leaves. Okay, fine. I don't mind looking silly and turning a book upside down and so on. Silly is my general aesthetic, so this doesn't throw me off my game whatsoever.
We get these leaves here and there, and then, at some point we get an EXTREMELY tiny leaf, the font is totally unreadable (I just so happened to have visited the eye doctor 3 days ago and have perfectly corrected vision, thank you very much).
Because this leaf is SO small, all I could think to do was grab my phone and use the camera as a magnifying glass. Which worked, I was able to read the text. BUT, it forced me to grab my phone and resist looking at texts and other shit, which seems to be antithetical to the purpose of the book, and I found that odd.
THEN, you turn the page. This is important, you turn the page, the next leaf isn't on the facing page, it's on the NEXT page, and it's the same leaf I just read, much larger this time. Totally read-able.
THEN, on the following page, you're informed that the leaf has struck the narrator in the face.
So, what we were seeing, through this visualization, is a leaf being blown straight at the narrator, gets closer, then hits him in the face. Which is totally fine, BUT, because there was NO WAY to know that I'd get the same leaf, in read-able size, on the next page, I went through the exercise of getting a phone and magnifying and doing all this shit unnecessarily.
And this, my friends, is where I part ways with the charms of books with unique layouts.
I'm a House of Leaves fan, it's a little gimmicky, but overall, it works, and it adds something to the story. It's rarely frustrating, just more...an unusual experience. Author Mark Z. Danielewski described it as climbing a mountain, you can see the top, you can see a couple different ways to get there, and you sort of pick your way along the route that looks best to you. And that makes sense.
Raw Shark Texts, same deal.
Maxwell's Demon felt, to me, like climbing a mountain, you see a trail sign that's in teeny, tiny letters, so you pull out your phone, even though the point of being in nature was to get away from shit, dismiss a couple notifications, check work email really quick, magnify the text, see that it's mildly helpful, then walk on, turn the corner, and find another sign with the same info, but in a font that is read-able by humans.
If the idea was to send readers running for their phones, I would be entertained. I mean, if the narrative leaned into that portion, the battle of electronic convenience and other joys, that'd work great. But that storyline, being almost entirely abandoned, doesn't feel like the motivation here. It feels like this was just an accident, a happenstance of printing that the repeated leaf is on a non-facing page (and is, I believe, the first repeated leaf, something that happens more later but not before this).
A minor annoyance, and, to me, a bad use of the technique of concrete poetry footnotes, let's call them, that lend credence to the argument that this sort of thing is just a gag, a gimmick.
March 11, 2021
5+ out of 5.
Absolutely astounding, and worth every minute of the wait. Hall proves that he is, indeed, one of the great writers of his generation by pulling off an even more audacious interrogation of the power of language and writing than he achieved in his debut, THE RAW SHARK TEXTS. Thick with questions about religion and the fundamental structures of the universe, the book also manages to keep the story rooted in a single man's experience -- as outlandish as that can sometimes be (because, well, isn't that true for all of us?)
I will be thinking about this book for a long, long time. I wonder if I ought to read it again, and soon. I'm still utterly reeling from the sequence of rugs that get pulled out from under the reader in the last fifty or so pages. Breathtaking.
Absolutely astounding, and worth every minute of the wait. Hall proves that he is, indeed, one of the great writers of his generation by pulling off an even more audacious interrogation of the power of language and writing than he achieved in his debut, THE RAW SHARK TEXTS. Thick with questions about religion and the fundamental structures of the universe, the book also manages to keep the story rooted in a single man's experience -- as outlandish as that can sometimes be (because, well, isn't that true for all of us?)
I will be thinking about this book for a long, long time. I wonder if I ought to read it again, and soon. I'm still utterly reeling from the sequence of rugs that get pulled out from under the reader in the last fifty or so pages. Breathtaking.
June 1, 2021
This, to me, seemed like somebody threw Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace and the script for the 2006 Will Ferrell movie Stranger than Fiction into a blender with a midlife crisis, added some ice and cheap dark rum, half of a theology degree and a piece of navel lint, and pressed pulse instead of liquefy.
My brother _might_ enjoy it.
_Might._
My brother _might_ enjoy it.
_Might._
November 6, 2022
"Il demone di Maxwell" è un mistero, la cui soluzione
è accessibile solo rompendo le pareti della logica,
ma è anche un visionario romanzo-mondo che
racconta il potere della scrittura di costruire ponti tra
le persone.
"Quando non desideri altro che startene tranquillo
l'universo tende ad accorgersene e la prende come
una sfida personale."
Il personaggio principale è Thomas Quinn, uno
scrittore alquanto fallito, figlio di Stanley, scrittore
invece affermato, da cui ha subito l'assenza ed un
rapporto difficile.
Dopo sette anni dalla morte del padre, Tom viene
turbato proprio dal defunto, ma anche da Andrew
Black, alunno prediletto di Stanley, che al contrario
del protagonista è riuscito a scrivere "Il motore di
Cupido" divenuto ormai un #bestseller;
da lì inizia un'indagine alquanto particolare e contro
ogni logica,
tra piani temporali diversi, in cui il tempo e l'entropia
assumono un ruolo fondamentale.
Steven Hall è uno scrittore visionario che vuole
mettere alla prova il lettore, lo sfida anche con
caratteri di stampa e calligrammi, per testarne la
volontà e l'inquietudine morale.
I temi trattati sono quelli alla base della creazione,
sui meccanismi dell'essere e del vivere ma anche la
scrittura è l'arte dello scrivere prevalgono
costantemente
ed i suggerimenti e le "dritte" vengono poste in
maniera molto apprezzabile.
Sicuramente dotato di estrema originalità ed elevata
scorrevolezza
"Il demone di Maxwell" prende di prepotenza un
posto nella mia libreria.
Come dice Mike Chesapeake: eccellente!
Per chi attendeva una nuova lettura ergodica.
eccola!
"Esistono cose che, semplicemente, non possiamo
capire."
Ho scoperto l'esperimento - il diavoletto di Maxwell-
ed è vero che come ha detto qualcuno questo
romanzo è un videogame!
"Possibile che otto parole su un foglio di carta
riescano a spingere una persona dotata di buon
senso a cercare in un posto che
non ha mai neanche sentito nominare?"
è accessibile solo rompendo le pareti della logica,
ma è anche un visionario romanzo-mondo che
racconta il potere della scrittura di costruire ponti tra
le persone.
"Quando non desideri altro che startene tranquillo
l'universo tende ad accorgersene e la prende come
una sfida personale."
Il personaggio principale è Thomas Quinn, uno
scrittore alquanto fallito, figlio di Stanley, scrittore
invece affermato, da cui ha subito l'assenza ed un
rapporto difficile.
Dopo sette anni dalla morte del padre, Tom viene
turbato proprio dal defunto, ma anche da Andrew
Black, alunno prediletto di Stanley, che al contrario
del protagonista è riuscito a scrivere "Il motore di
Cupido" divenuto ormai un #bestseller;
da lì inizia un'indagine alquanto particolare e contro
ogni logica,
tra piani temporali diversi, in cui il tempo e l'entropia
assumono un ruolo fondamentale.
Steven Hall è uno scrittore visionario che vuole
mettere alla prova il lettore, lo sfida anche con
caratteri di stampa e calligrammi, per testarne la
volontà e l'inquietudine morale.
I temi trattati sono quelli alla base della creazione,
sui meccanismi dell'essere e del vivere ma anche la
scrittura è l'arte dello scrivere prevalgono
costantemente
ed i suggerimenti e le "dritte" vengono poste in
maniera molto apprezzabile.
Sicuramente dotato di estrema originalità ed elevata
scorrevolezza
"Il demone di Maxwell" prende di prepotenza un
posto nella mia libreria.
Come dice Mike Chesapeake: eccellente!
Per chi attendeva una nuova lettura ergodica.
eccola!
"Esistono cose che, semplicemente, non possiamo
capire."
Ho scoperto l'esperimento - il diavoletto di Maxwell-
ed è vero che come ha detto qualcuno questo
romanzo è un videogame!
"Possibile che otto parole su un foglio di carta
riescano a spingere una persona dotata di buon
senso a cercare in un posto che
non ha mai neanche sentito nominare?"
Read
August 27, 2021The following book reviews have been shared by Text Publishing – publisher of Maxwell's Demon
‘Labyrinthine, mind-twisting and deliciously diabolical, yet also unexpectedly warm-hearted. Maxwell’s Demon is fantastic.’
Christopher Brookmyre
‘I enjoyed Maxwell’s Demon a great deal. Anyone who enjoyed The Raw Shark Texts will be delighted by it.’
Toby Litt
‘A cracking detective story that seems to be investigating its own existence. Hall explores that rich border zone that lies between fiction and non-fiction, and does it with verve and a playful, adventurous spirit. A unique voice in exploratory fiction.’
Jeff Noon
‘Dazzlingly clever, wickedly playful, devastatingly poignant.’
Mike Carey
‘A wonderfully imaginative, splendidly baroque novel that is a combination of the baffling, teasing and tantalising. Part fantasy, part mystery, it is altogether delightful and filled with surprises – in a word, exceptional. No, make that two words; the second is fantastic. A rare, sui generis treat’
Booklist, starred review
‘An engaging, pacy mystery as well as an exploration of reality, entropy and the language of a modern creative landscape . . . The book is full of conceptual and typographic trickery and it’s soaked in an appreciation of the written word’
Independent
‘Moves at an exhilarating lick . . . The genius of the book is that despite it seeming like an elegant orrery, all these wheels within wheels are a carapace, a psychic armour against a grief (and it’s not the grief you were expecting). Beneath this truly beautiful astrolabe is a beating human heart.’
Stuart Kelly Scotsman
‘A smart, teasing and (above all) lovable mystery tale . . . Superb’
Sunday Telegraph
'Consistently fun and often impressive.’
Guardian
‘Ingeniously plotted and compulsively well-paced, a blend of detective story and science fiction with an epistemology course thrown in.’
Sunday Times
‘An entropic and sprawling mystery . . . Mind-twisting . . . Introspective and philosophical, the novel explores the dangers that occur when fatalistic urges take over.’
New Statesman
���Written in the first person and paced like a thriller, there’s an intimacy and immediacy that quickly grips, and even the long digressions on theory — a trademark of the form — are enjoyable to read’
Spectator
‘It’s Raymond Chandler meets Dan Brown meets Albert Einstein. Meets Christopher Nolan. Meets Jorge Luis Borges. It’s a mind-expanding page-turning adventure-mystery that crackles with intelligence and intrigue; a book about books (sort of) that’s been beautifully rendered in book form.’
Foyles
‘Anyone who has a taste for postmodern hijinks – fans of Thomas Pynchon or Mark Z. Danielewski – will be drawn to the menace and profusion, the same-like brilliance and black hilarity of Maxwell’s Demon.’
Sydney Morning Herald
'There's no denying what a brilliant writer Hall is.'
Good Reading
‘As melancholy as it is captivating. Whether pertaining to thermodynamics or company kept around a manger or autumn leaves born of text and set free, Maxwell’s Demon is hard to put down. Even when you’re done.’
Mark Z Danielewski
‘There’s really nothing like this book—long contemplations of philosophy, personality, religion and history are all woven into something of a mystery in which no one is truly reliable...Hall manages to put a whole world on the page that shifts and changes as weirdly and wildly as the ones in the novel’s fictional books...Written with verve and a vast appreciation for the power of language.’
Kirkus Reviews
‘Hall takes great pleasure in his half of the job and leads us playfully through the book’s various twists and turns...This is a novel that requires patience, but the sheer jouissance of Hall’s writing means that that patience...will not go unrewarded.’
TLS
‘A postmodern literary thriller about a difficult second novel...Anyone who has a taste for postmodern hijinks...will be drawn to the menace and profusion, the game-like brilliance and black hilarity.’
Australian
‘Labyrinthine, mind-twisting and deliciously diabolical, yet also unexpectedly warm-hearted. Maxwell’s Demon is fantastic.’
Christopher Brookmyre
‘I enjoyed Maxwell’s Demon a great deal. Anyone who enjoyed The Raw Shark Texts will be delighted by it.’
Toby Litt
‘A cracking detective story that seems to be investigating its own existence. Hall explores that rich border zone that lies between fiction and non-fiction, and does it with verve and a playful, adventurous spirit. A unique voice in exploratory fiction.’
Jeff Noon
‘Dazzlingly clever, wickedly playful, devastatingly poignant.’
Mike Carey
‘A wonderfully imaginative, splendidly baroque novel that is a combination of the baffling, teasing and tantalising. Part fantasy, part mystery, it is altogether delightful and filled with surprises – in a word, exceptional. No, make that two words; the second is fantastic. A rare, sui generis treat’
Booklist, starred review
‘An engaging, pacy mystery as well as an exploration of reality, entropy and the language of a modern creative landscape . . . The book is full of conceptual and typographic trickery and it’s soaked in an appreciation of the written word’
Independent
‘Moves at an exhilarating lick . . . The genius of the book is that despite it seeming like an elegant orrery, all these wheels within wheels are a carapace, a psychic armour against a grief (and it’s not the grief you were expecting). Beneath this truly beautiful astrolabe is a beating human heart.’
Stuart Kelly Scotsman
‘A smart, teasing and (above all) lovable mystery tale . . . Superb’
Sunday Telegraph
'Consistently fun and often impressive.’
Guardian
‘Ingeniously plotted and compulsively well-paced, a blend of detective story and science fiction with an epistemology course thrown in.’
Sunday Times
‘An entropic and sprawling mystery . . . Mind-twisting . . . Introspective and philosophical, the novel explores the dangers that occur when fatalistic urges take over.’
New Statesman
���Written in the first person and paced like a thriller, there’s an intimacy and immediacy that quickly grips, and even the long digressions on theory — a trademark of the form — are enjoyable to read’
Spectator
‘It’s Raymond Chandler meets Dan Brown meets Albert Einstein. Meets Christopher Nolan. Meets Jorge Luis Borges. It’s a mind-expanding page-turning adventure-mystery that crackles with intelligence and intrigue; a book about books (sort of) that’s been beautifully rendered in book form.’
Foyles
‘Anyone who has a taste for postmodern hijinks – fans of Thomas Pynchon or Mark Z. Danielewski – will be drawn to the menace and profusion, the same-like brilliance and black hilarity of Maxwell’s Demon.’
Sydney Morning Herald
'There's no denying what a brilliant writer Hall is.'
Good Reading
‘As melancholy as it is captivating. Whether pertaining to thermodynamics or company kept around a manger or autumn leaves born of text and set free, Maxwell’s Demon is hard to put down. Even when you’re done.’
Mark Z Danielewski
‘There’s really nothing like this book—long contemplations of philosophy, personality, religion and history are all woven into something of a mystery in which no one is truly reliable...Hall manages to put a whole world on the page that shifts and changes as weirdly and wildly as the ones in the novel’s fictional books...Written with verve and a vast appreciation for the power of language.’
Kirkus Reviews
‘Hall takes great pleasure in his half of the job and leads us playfully through the book’s various twists and turns...This is a novel that requires patience, but the sheer jouissance of Hall’s writing means that that patience...will not go unrewarded.’
TLS
‘A postmodern literary thriller about a difficult second novel...Anyone who has a taste for postmodern hijinks...will be drawn to the menace and profusion, the game-like brilliance and black hilarity.’
Australian
March 28, 2021
A relentlessly twisty thriller that blends the line between fiction, reality and encyclopedia entry so many times that you begin to forget that these are actually separate ideas.
The main character Thomas Quinn is a struggling author and self-insert for the actual author Steven Hall (many career beats are shared; write what you know I guess). He is the somewhat estranged son of a critically acclaimed journalist, whose protégé Andrew Black wrote what was widely acclaimed to be one of the finest novels of all time, and then promptly vanished.
The story picks up with Quinn receiving an answerphone message that sounds an awful lot like his now dead father. This sends him down a rabbit hole of mystery; chasing clues and finding himself entangled in the hunt for missing author Black, as well as Black's mysterious second novel. He also soon finds that fiction is bleeding into reality, with characters from books seemingly appearing in real life, and fictional locations suddenly being real. He naturally questions his sanity, and Hall does a good job of getting the reader to question theirs as well.
So far all of this sounds pretty good; and it could very well be a solid thriller. Unfortunately, so much of it is presented in a bizarre way, a manner that seems only to scream "gosh, look how clever I am" with a smug grin. We have pages upon pages dedicated to fully irrelevant quantum physics, entropy, biblical studies and other esoteric ideas. These could generously be said to be adding to the air of mystery and confusion around the story, but otherwise seem to obscure that there's really not all that much underneath.
We also have some experimental typography, with sections of the text laid out in fancy patterns; mostly leaves. Ooh so quirky. It was fun when House of Leaves did it, but again here it seems to be all style and no substance; what exactly was the point of that? How did it tie to the themes or narrative? I just don't believe it did.
As we approach the end of the story, the twists pick up, becoming more frequent and more insane. The people in the book are full on crazy people, and act in full on crazy ways. This could be one where you can argue that that's the central thesis; devotion and obsession make people do crazy things. But we're talking beyond psychopath levels here, and the way it's framed in this novel; part seemingly glorifying the insanity, part accepting it as normal, just does not land well.
And the final twists leave us thoroughly without a frame of reference for what the reality of the novel is, which removes any stakes we could have invested in it. If anything could be real- does anything matter? I'm reminded of a Stephen King short story (Word Processor of the Gods), where he uses the same ultimate conclusion to generate a much greater impact in only a dozen pages or so.
So in short, what could be an interesting twist-filled thriller is ruined by pseudo-intellectual waffling and unnecessary gimmicks.
The main character Thomas Quinn is a struggling author and self-insert for the actual author Steven Hall (many career beats are shared; write what you know I guess). He is the somewhat estranged son of a critically acclaimed journalist, whose protégé Andrew Black wrote what was widely acclaimed to be one of the finest novels of all time, and then promptly vanished.
The story picks up with Quinn receiving an answerphone message that sounds an awful lot like his now dead father. This sends him down a rabbit hole of mystery; chasing clues and finding himself entangled in the hunt for missing author Black, as well as Black's mysterious second novel. He also soon finds that fiction is bleeding into reality, with characters from books seemingly appearing in real life, and fictional locations suddenly being real. He naturally questions his sanity, and Hall does a good job of getting the reader to question theirs as well.
So far all of this sounds pretty good; and it could very well be a solid thriller. Unfortunately, so much of it is presented in a bizarre way, a manner that seems only to scream "gosh, look how clever I am" with a smug grin. We have pages upon pages dedicated to fully irrelevant quantum physics, entropy, biblical studies and other esoteric ideas. These could generously be said to be adding to the air of mystery and confusion around the story, but otherwise seem to obscure that there's really not all that much underneath.
We also have some experimental typography, with sections of the text laid out in fancy patterns; mostly leaves. Ooh so quirky. It was fun when House of Leaves did it, but again here it seems to be all style and no substance; what exactly was the point of that? How did it tie to the themes or narrative? I just don't believe it did.
As we approach the end of the story, the twists pick up, becoming more frequent and more insane. The people in the book are full on crazy people, and act in full on crazy ways. This could be one where you can argue that that's the central thesis; devotion and obsession make people do crazy things. But we're talking beyond psychopath levels here, and the way it's framed in this novel; part seemingly glorifying the insanity, part accepting it as normal, just does not land well.
And the final twists leave us thoroughly without a frame of reference for what the reality of the novel is, which removes any stakes we could have invested in it. If anything could be real- does anything matter? I'm reminded of a Stephen King short story (Word Processor of the Gods), where he uses the same ultimate conclusion to generate a much greater impact in only a dozen pages or so.
So in short, what could be an interesting twist-filled thriller is ruined by pseudo-intellectual waffling and unnecessary gimmicks.
July 6, 2021
Thanks to NetGalley and Grove Atlantic for an eARC of this book. The following review is my honest reflection on the text provided.
I've put off writing this review for about a week but it doesn't seem to have helped; I have absolutely no idea what this book is about. I can appreciate what Hall was trying to do here but it just didn't work for me. I love a good mind-bending twist but either there were too many here or the resolution wasn't enough to make sense of them.
None of the characters were likeable and I didn't believe a lot of the motivations behind their actions, even before the . The setting felt confused between contemporary and futuristic and I had to suspend disbelief a lot to follow the plot. I have no problem with abstract writing and there were parts of this book I found enjoyable, but I felt confused and let down in the end. There was potential with the order vs chaos theme, it just missed the mark and probably could have used a little less chaos.
I've put off writing this review for about a week but it doesn't seem to have helped; I have absolutely no idea what this book is about. I can appreciate what Hall was trying to do here but it just didn't work for me. I love a good mind-bending twist but either there were too many here or the resolution wasn't enough to make sense of them.
None of the characters were likeable and I didn't believe a lot of the motivations behind their actions, even before the . The setting felt confused between contemporary and futuristic and I had to suspend disbelief a lot to follow the plot. I have no problem with abstract writing and there were parts of this book I found enjoyable, but I felt confused and let down in the end. There was potential with the order vs chaos theme, it just missed the mark and probably could have used a little less chaos.
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April 14, 2020
Much like the protagonist, Thomas Quinn, I spent much of this book not really sure what was going on. The novel is like a hall of mirrors, you catch sight of something, think you know where you’re going, but no, it was a trick or a distortion of reality.
I enjoyed the theme of entropy and thinking about whether decreasing entropy is the same as time travel. I also liked the theme of words in some way causing reality, although some of the philosophy surrounding that got a bit too Biblical for me.
The ending and resolution of the story was preposterously unbelievable, but then again I think it was supposed to be.
A solid three star read.
Thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for providing a review copy in exchange for honest feedback.
I enjoyed the theme of entropy and thinking about whether decreasing entropy is the same as time travel. I also liked the theme of words in some way causing reality, although some of the philosophy surrounding that got a bit too Biblical for me.
The ending and resolution of the story was preposterously unbelievable, but then again I think it was supposed to be.
A solid three star read.
Thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for providing a review copy in exchange for honest feedback.
December 3, 2023
Cross between the Truman Show and a treatise about what makes existence possible: language and writing or someone’s unchronicled life. A mystery with repeated diatribes about identity. All in all nothing terribly magnificent.
April 21, 2024
Thomas Quinn è uno scrittore fallito. Di più: è uno scrittore fallito figlio di un grandissimo, famosissimo e defunto scrittore, Stanley Quinn. Thomas invece ha prodotto un solo romanzo, ed è stato un flop. Un flop così grosso che non ci ha più provato, e ora si guadagna da vivere scrivendo episodi per show televisivi, campo in cui se la cava. Al momento, però, ha dei debiti sul groppone, e la sua adorata moglie è lontana per lavoro, migliaia di chilometri, ma come fosse su un altro pianeta: sull’Isola di Pasqua.
Poi c’è Andrew Black, che fu l’assistente di Stanley ed è l’autore di un poderoso romanzo giallo (un mattone sulle mille pagine, se ricordo bene) di incredibile successo, “Il motore di Cupido” lodato dalla critica, venerato dai lettori, enorme successo di vendite, libro perfetto e insolito che funziona come un ingranaggio perfetto; non c’è nulla che il mondo editoriale aspetti di più che un seguito del Il motore di Cupido. Eppure Andrew Black è sparito dalla circolazione, non vuole più scrivere e nessuno sa il perché.
Tom ha uno strano rapporto con Andrew: da una parte invidia il suo successo, e il legame stretto che aveva avuto con Stanley, mentre nella sua vita il padre era stato piuttosto assente, sempre occupato, in giro per il mondo. Dall’altra Andrew, con le sua fissazioni, le sue manie, il suo strano contegno, lo affascina; negli anni hanno costruito una specie di rapporto che forse è esagerato definire amicizia, eppure è qualcosa.
E un giorno Thomas riceve una telefonata in cui la voce del defunto padre gli dice una frase misteriosa di cui lui non riesce a immaginare il significato. E riceve un’altrettanto misteriosa lettera da Andrew, con la foto di una strana sfera nera.
E qui il motore (perché come è Andrew stesso a dire, un romanzo è un motore) si mette in moto, e gli ingranaggi saranno la fisica, la bibbia, gli angeli spaventosi, le antiche lettere dell’alfabeto, i paradossi temporali (autentici o presunti?)… l’entropia che tutto inghiotte.
Durante la lettura ho anche avuto un momento di terrore trovandomi davanti la spiegazione del demone di Maxwell (oddio non dirmi che è un libro in cui abbonderà la fisica perché allora non ci capirò nulla). Per fortuna invece la lettura prosegue godibilmente anche per chi, come me, festeggiava un 6 in fisica come la vittoria ai mondiali.
In realtà il libro è un buco nero di nozioni da cui si può essere facilmente risucchiati: nozioni bibliche, specialmente: gli angeli, le lettere, gli hayyot, mitologia ebraica. Ed è anche un labirinto, questo romanzo, perché è facile perdersi e confondersi e chiedersi se Andrew è un pazzo scatenato o se davvero il mondo finirà per colpa degli ebook. O se il matto è Thomas e stiamo vivendo una sua fantasia.
Un labirinto, di specchi, per di più.
Poi c’è Andrew Black, che fu l’assistente di Stanley ed è l’autore di un poderoso romanzo giallo (un mattone sulle mille pagine, se ricordo bene) di incredibile successo, “Il motore di Cupido” lodato dalla critica, venerato dai lettori, enorme successo di vendite, libro perfetto e insolito che funziona come un ingranaggio perfetto; non c’è nulla che il mondo editoriale aspetti di più che un seguito del Il motore di Cupido. Eppure Andrew Black è sparito dalla circolazione, non vuole più scrivere e nessuno sa il perché.
Tom ha uno strano rapporto con Andrew: da una parte invidia il suo successo, e il legame stretto che aveva avuto con Stanley, mentre nella sua vita il padre era stato piuttosto assente, sempre occupato, in giro per il mondo. Dall’altra Andrew, con le sua fissazioni, le sue manie, il suo strano contegno, lo affascina; negli anni hanno costruito una specie di rapporto che forse è esagerato definire amicizia, eppure è qualcosa.
E un giorno Thomas riceve una telefonata in cui la voce del defunto padre gli dice una frase misteriosa di cui lui non riesce a immaginare il significato. E riceve un’altrettanto misteriosa lettera da Andrew, con la foto di una strana sfera nera.
E qui il motore (perché come è Andrew stesso a dire, un romanzo è un motore) si mette in moto, e gli ingranaggi saranno la fisica, la bibbia, gli angeli spaventosi, le antiche lettere dell’alfabeto, i paradossi temporali (autentici o presunti?)… l’entropia che tutto inghiotte.
Durante la lettura ho anche avuto un momento di terrore trovandomi davanti la spiegazione del demone di Maxwell (oddio non dirmi che è un libro in cui abbonderà la fisica perché allora non ci capirò nulla). Per fortuna invece la lettura prosegue godibilmente anche per chi, come me, festeggiava un 6 in fisica come la vittoria ai mondiali.
In realtà il libro è un buco nero di nozioni da cui si può essere facilmente risucchiati: nozioni bibliche, specialmente: gli angeli, le lettere, gli hayyot, mitologia ebraica. Ed è anche un labirinto, questo romanzo, perché è facile perdersi e confondersi e chiedersi se Andrew è un pazzo scatenato o se davvero il mondo finirà per colpa degli ebook. O se il matto è Thomas e stiamo vivendo una sua fantasia.
Un labirinto, di specchi, per di più.
April 8, 2021
AAARGH! What to say about this book? Well, I can't say much. I don't want to give anything away. At the heart of Maxwell's Demon is Thomas Quinn, a failed novelist, and his relationship with a far more successful and highly enigmatic writer.
Thomas observes that this other writer has authored an ingeniously, meticulously constructed novel--but it is actually Mr. Hall that has accomplished that feat. At another point, a character warns Thomas of the danger of a shiny object leading to capture in a raccoon trap. But the warning may as well have been directed to the reader, because we are along for a wild ride with Thomas, and are just as captured by the gravitational pull of mysteries at the heart of the book.
All I can say about the plot is... I don't care how sophisticated or careful a reader you are, you do NOT know where this story is going. And, you need to be prepared for the author to manipulate you. Then after you finish reading, either begin a Ph.D. program or join a book group, because there's a lot to analyze here!
Fourteen years after his celebrated debut, this is Mr. Hall's sophomore effort. Holy crap! What's he going to do for his third novel?? This was AMAZING!
Thomas observes that this other writer has authored an ingeniously, meticulously constructed novel--but it is actually Mr. Hall that has accomplished that feat. At another point, a character warns Thomas of the danger of a shiny object leading to capture in a raccoon trap. But the warning may as well have been directed to the reader, because we are along for a wild ride with Thomas, and are just as captured by the gravitational pull of mysteries at the heart of the book.
All I can say about the plot is... I don't care how sophisticated or careful a reader you are, you do NOT know where this story is going. And, you need to be prepared for the author to manipulate you. Then after you finish reading, either begin a Ph.D. program or join a book group, because there's a lot to analyze here!
Fourteen years after his celebrated debut, this is Mr. Hall's sophomore effort. Holy crap! What's he going to do for his third novel?? This was AMAZING!
January 26, 2023
Il succo, direi, è che i romanzi, anche i più semplici, sono infidi. In un romanzo pochissime cose sono esattamente come appaiono, e se ci pensate, in realtà non appare quasi niente.
Ho voluto leggere questo libro perché conoscevo l'esperimento mentale del diavoletto di Maxwell, e tutta la prima parte che lo riguarda mi ha molto intrigato... Poi pian piano il mio interesse è andato scemando fino procurarmi un feroce mal di testa, con la speranza che questo incredibile viaggio finisse. Forse non era il momento più adatto per leggerlo. In questo libro devi attraversare la trama, anzi, più trame, perderti tra i calligrammi e le storie, per poi arrivare a una conclusione sicuramente spettacolare. È interessante, ma allo stesso tempo complesso, quindi non mi sentirò proprio di consigliarlo, a meno che non si ricerchi una lettura più partecipativa e attenta.
Ho voluto leggere questo libro perché conoscevo l'esperimento mentale del diavoletto di Maxwell, e tutta la prima parte che lo riguarda mi ha molto intrigato... Poi pian piano il mio interesse è andato scemando fino procurarmi un feroce mal di testa, con la speranza che questo incredibile viaggio finisse. Forse non era il momento più adatto per leggerlo. In questo libro devi attraversare la trama, anzi, più trame, perderti tra i calligrammi e le storie, per poi arrivare a una conclusione sicuramente spettacolare. È interessante, ma allo stesso tempo complesso, quindi non mi sentirò proprio di consigliarlo, a meno che non si ricerchi una lettura più partecipativa e attenta.
April 1, 2021
Wat is het toch dat al die mannen zo nodig metafictie moeten schrijven? Beetje verplassen wie de beste puzzel kan verzinnen? Terwijl een boek voor mij gewoon over mensen moet gaan, maar dat vergeten ze dan, de personages zijn kapstokken. Niet aan mij besteed.
(Terwijl ik bijvoorbeeld Lanny van Max Porter wel fantastisch vond. En KliFi begint ook behoorlijk meta. Maar in beide boeken blijft het om de personages gaan.)
(Terwijl ik bijvoorbeeld Lanny van Max Porter wel fantastisch vond. En KliFi begint ook behoorlijk meta. Maar in beide boeken blijft het om de personages gaan.)
July 28, 2021
Full review will follow later - but it did not live up to my expectations and got drowned in semi-intellectual Dan Brown-esque bible study. Thanks but no thanks.
December 21, 2021
This book .... Wow. It's been a very long time since I read The Raw Shark Texts, Mr. Hall's first novel, but I remember it with great affection. It was a lot of fun to read, twisty and slippery, and it made me struggle, which I loved.
This book does more. When I read a truly innovative, smart, unusual book, I often feel like I'm not quite smart enough to grasp everything the author is trying to say. I feel like I'll need to go back and reread the book to begin to grasp, with the help of knowing the outcome, the way the author laid out the pathways, set the trap, and pulled me in. With this book, I feel that I was on a high ladder, reaching even higher, and still not grasping everything. God, Lucifer, entropy, creation, extinction, mystery, confusion, deception, real Mystery - and at the end, when I read the last page - a sense of uplift and happiness and confusion and appreciation. Maxwell's Demon was, for me, an amazing read, extremely entertaining while at the same time being challenging and difficult, telling a story about writing, reading, authorial creation and what that means for the reader and the world in which they live. I loved it, was forced to think about myth and creation and dissolution, while at the same time having a great time with the story. Amazing stuff.
This book does more. When I read a truly innovative, smart, unusual book, I often feel like I'm not quite smart enough to grasp everything the author is trying to say. I feel like I'll need to go back and reread the book to begin to grasp, with the help of knowing the outcome, the way the author laid out the pathways, set the trap, and pulled me in. With this book, I feel that I was on a high ladder, reaching even higher, and still not grasping everything. God, Lucifer, entropy, creation, extinction, mystery, confusion, deception, real Mystery - and at the end, when I read the last page - a sense of uplift and happiness and confusion and appreciation. Maxwell's Demon was, for me, an amazing read, extremely entertaining while at the same time being challenging and difficult, telling a story about writing, reading, authorial creation and what that means for the reader and the world in which they live. I loved it, was forced to think about myth and creation and dissolution, while at the same time having a great time with the story. Amazing stuff.
January 9, 2024
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