Dr Moreau 2008-06-09
1 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
It's really painful for me to read the fawning praise by other Amazon reviewers lionizing this book for its originality. The entire work could serve as a cliché for artistic pretentiousness at its worst, an exercise in trivial and transparently post-modern intellectual narcissism. Often when you hear an artist's work described as `experimental', it's code for `original but not very good.' This book effectively epitomizes the notion of experimentalism gone awry. Since there is basically no story, we are left with the writing - unremarkable at best - and the ideas, which basically catalogue frivolous lines of thought in which the narrator marvels at the breaking of his shoelaces two days apart, the evolution from milk delivery to cartons, the pleasures of refilling a stapler, and other nonsense. In effect, the author thought it would be clever to hit the reader over the head for 150 pages with life's absurdity. How could this be entertaining? I wondered too and made the mistake of finding out.
I read another reviewer, doubtless agitated by some reference to the book's vapidity, declare that people focus too much on the big questions, when it is really the minutiae that make the difference in our quality of life. I disagree. The reason people differentiate between minutiae and the important is precisely because one is far more relevant to our existence than the other. Maybe there is some nihilistic wisdom in cultivating a jubilant reaction to menial tasks and minor feats of engineering, giving exaggerated meaning and joy to people whose lives are otherwise ordinary and mediocre in every facet, but it's boring as hell to read about.
