Would love to hear your thoughts on this one, I just finished reading it and feel like there is a lot to unpack!
I would desperately need a weekend to recover after a Thursday like this
On the Real Though:
I don’t think there was any way for me to possibly anticipate where this story was going. I mean, I thought I had it pegged, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. I couldn’t tell if I was in the midst of a philosophical debate, a detective story, or a metaphysical discussion, but what I did know was that I loved every minute.
I don’t think I have faced a book which brought up so many questions of morality, ethics, the afterlife, and honor since Siddhartha, and yet it was approached in an entirely different way. Rather than experience a realistic journey, we see this through the eyes of an absurd sequence of events.
What I find most impressive, more so than any thought experiments the author puts you through, is the pacing. The flow of the story and the purposeful scenes and writing style perfectly match the readers mood and desire to interpret what is happening. This ability to stress the reader out with confusion or calm them down with respective plot points is really something I have rarely encountered.
All in all I really enjoyed this, but I also had the fortune to read with friends, which brought a lot of depth and interesting analysis out which I may not have otherwise found!
by VELELLANOVELLA
5 Comments
I don’t think many people read Chesterton anymore.
I read it decades ago. r/suggestmeabook, r/fantasy and r/printsf might have some suggestions for you if you want more philosophically oriented reads.
It’s been a while since I read it, but I mostly remember feeling confused, and a bit cheated. It went from feeling very predictable, to suddenly having no idea what was going on. I also don’t remember the deeper exploration of ethics or philosophy you talk about, but maybe I just didn’t pick up on it. Overall, I wasn’t a fan.
i thought it was a cheap dig at anarchists and socialists. the philosophical bit seemed artificial and over-wrought to me. story-wise, there was no sense of suspense or urgency. it began well but it very quickly turned into a repetitive farce where it was the same joke again and again. i didn’t get it.
Its philosophy was garbage, but the surrealist twist was entertaining.
Chesterton is one of my favorites! And I love this book, it’s the only Chesterton novel — key word novel — I’ve read so far: I still haven’t managed to get into The Ball and the Cross.
I totally agree with you about the thought experiments — it’s like being on a rollercoaster when you are suddenly thrown from philosophy to grotesque and back again. At first I mostly read it for the “fun parts” (the debate between Wilkes and Worms is… just about one of the most hilarious scenes in Chesterton), but the philosophy got to me eventually as well.
I even wrote a paper on it in my last year of school )