A New Muse
Marisha Pessl’s book haunted me in that it kept popping out of nowhere when I dug through all the boxes during the Borders Book Fair a few weeks back. It was somehow telling me, “Read me! Read me! Read me!” and, at first, I hesitated, thinking it was just another one of those physics-related books that would make me want to choke on my own saliva because it was that bad or that uninteresting.
Finally, on the last day of the book fair, I decided to give it a chance, not to mention how amazingly good looking the author’s photograph was. I was intrigued partly because I wanted to know if such a creature, as beautiful as she, could ever achieve literary heights. And from the looks of the book cover, people have found out that it is quite possible to have such an extraordinary package of both beauty and brains. Pessl was defying the very laws of nature; if it was in the realm of physics, I could never know (because I almost failed that subject when I was in high school).
Nonetheless, the defining moment that got me hooked on her novel was when I flipped through the pages and found her table of contents (marked as Required Readings and following it, a list of book titles and a Final Exam as its pseudo-epilogue). It was, to my delight, simple yet so ingenious that I somehow wished I were as perceptive as she. Of course, after that, I went home with the book under my arm.
I finished Special Topics in Calamity Physics last Friday night. The book was breathtaking, especially the last parts. I admit that I was delaying my reading because I knew, for sure, that the good stuff was about to end. When I got to the very last sentence and stared at the final punctuation that put a halt to the journey of Blue Van Meer’s so-called “autobiographical” account, I was itching for more wonderful prose, for more witty referencing, for more of Pessl’s genius. I was like a person on crack whose high was slowly bringing him back down to Earth. I was midly livid, if there is any such level of paradox. Yes, the book had been a wonderful subsitute for ampethamine and it broke my heart when I had to put it down on the pile of “Read” books; I wish it weren’t so.
This one gets into my Favorites too.
