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As two physicists, Alice and Professor Soft, create their own approaches to the Lack, Alice drifts away from her close relationship with Engstrand. Refusing to believe her love for him can die so completely, Engstrand does whatever he can to remain close to Alice, even getting pulled into the cabal which is eventually formed to regulate access to the Lack. Lethem's characterizations are good, for the most part, and many of the characters exhibit change, if not growth throughout the course of the novel. Initial reader's reaction to a character is often proved false by later events as Engstrand, and through him to reader, comes to know characters better. Even characters who at first seem likely to be unlikable foils turn out to be nothing more or less than an average person trying to succeed. This is actually one of the central themes of the novel. Alice's estrangement from Philip and his own desire to retain her are signs of their seeking their own identity. Both characters are as blind to themselves as Evan and Garth, the two blind men Alice invites to move in with Philip, are to their surroundings. In one notable scene, Philip even goes so far as to adopt a personality completely unrelated to the academic he really is, claiming, instead, to be a consultant to identify Nobel quality research. Perhaps my biggest complaint about this novel has nothing to do with Lethem at all. His first three books have amazingly evocative covers, from the beaten-up detective novel look of Gun, With Occasion Music to the Old Road Side appearance of Amnesia Moon. In moving from a smaller publisher to Doubleday, Lethem's cover art seems to suffer from a desire to push him into the mainstream. I picked up this novel intending only to read a few pages before going to bed. By the time I forced myself to put it down, I had read more than half the book, anxious to be able to return to Lethem's university and knowing the novel was too short. Lethem's novels and short stories, one of which is a Nebula nominee continue to get better. With luck, he'll have a long, productive literary life. Ingenious, hilarious, and genuinely mind-expanding, As She Climbed Across the Table is the best boy-meets-girl-meets- void story ever written. I love Jonathan Lethem's voice. The style he writes in is so casual, so sly you feel like you need to reread the words to make sure you haven't missed something important or at least clever. As She At times this book amused me, and at times it annoyed me. I think it is a book best read in the years right after its publication, because it feels now, a dozen years on, to be too caught up in a As She Climbed Across the Table. Jonathan Lethem. As She Climbed Across the Table by Jonathan Lethem

Initial reader's reaction to a character is often proved false by later events as Engstrand, and through him to reader, comes to know characters better. Even characters who at first seem likely to be unlikable foils turn out to be nothing more or less than an average person trying to succeed. This is actually one of the central themes of the novel. Alice's estrangement from Philip and his own desire to retain her are signs of their seeking their own identity. Both characters are as blind to themselves as Evan and Garth, the two blind men Alice invites to move in with Philip, are to their surroundings. In one notable scene, Philip even goes so far as to adopt a personality completely unrelated to the academic he really is, claiming, instead, to be a consultant to identify Nobel quality research. Perhaps my biggest complaint about this novel has nothing to do with Lethem at all. His first three books have amazingly evocative covers, from the beaten-up detective novel look of Gun, With Occasion Music to the Old Road Side appearance of Amnesia Moon. In moving from a smaller publisher to Doubleday, Lethem's cover art seems to suffer from a desire to push him into the mainstream. I picked up this novel intending only to read a few pages before going to bed. By the time I forced myself to put it down, I had read more than half the book, anxious to be able to return to Lethem's university and knowing the novel was too short. Lethem's novels and short stories, one of which is a Nebula nominee continue to get better. With luck, he'll have a long, productive literary life. Purchase this book in hardcover from. Purchase this book in trade paperback from. Return to. But Lack is a nullity with taste—tastes; it absorbs a pomegranate, light bulbs, an argyle sock; it disdains a bow tie, an ice ax, and a scrambled duck egg. To Alice, this selectivity translates as an irresistible personality. To Philip, it makes Lack an unbeatable rival, for how can he win Alice back from something that has no flaws—because it has no qualities? Ingenious, hilarious, and genuinely mind-expanding, As She Climbed Across the Table is the best boy-meets-girl-meets-void story ever written. I love Jonathan Lethem's voice. The style he writes in is so casual, so sly you feel like you need to reread the words to make sure you haven't missed something important or at least clever. As She At times this book amused me, and at times it annoyed me. As She Climbed Across the Table - Wikipedia

He enters Lacks chamber and slides himself into Lack. He wakes up the next morning realizing he is no longer in the universe he was the night before. After retrieving B as proof of the universe, Philip heads back to Lack and climbs in. However, instead of going back to reality as he expects, he enters a new universe that has no light. The universe is inhabited by Evan and Garth, two blind men who had also climbed into Lack. The two men help Philip climb into Lack once again. This time, instead of entering a new universe, he merges and becomes one with Lack. Alice, feeling that Philip and Lack are now one thing, attempts one last time to enter Lack. Reviewers considered the book a light read that was entertaining. Steven E. Alford says "It embodies a distilled, gentle, silly look at the world". Glen Engel-Cox points out that instead of like a traditional science fiction, focusing on a "driven scientist in that endless pursuit of knowledge", As She Climbed Across the Table focuses on "someone like us [a science fiction reader], intrigued by the type but not one of them himself. Eric Weeks compares it to The Tao of Physics with its "muddled attempts to be philosophical about quantum mechanics which fail to get the physics correct. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Dewey Decimal. Retrieved June 27, Jonathan Lethem. The Exegesis of Philip K. Omega the Unknown. Carter Scholz Christopher Sorrentino. Categories : American novels science fiction novels Novels by Jonathan Lethem American science fiction novels Novels set in California Doubleday publisher books. The sequence in the book's final pages, when Phillip finally enters Lack, was brilliant. The book definitely needed a lot more of that and a lot less self pity. My favourite moment of the entire book was when one of the characters, Soft, declares that men can grow and expand in the company of women in a way that they cannot in the company of men or a mixed group. Which just underpins the entire tone of the novel: women are to be steamrolled and silenced by the will of men around them, because they're silly and not very good at physics. Their only escape is a hole into another universe built out of themselves. Or something. I found this book a bit weird, crazy and funny at times. I was confused as to what the heck these people were thinking. I think they all need their heads examined. May 08, Crystal rated it liked it Recommends it for: lovers of satire or psuedoscience. Jonathan Lethem's As She Climbed Across the Table is two books in one: a parable about love and obsession, and a sharp satire of academia. It is narrated by Phillip Engstrand, a sociology professor who talks entirely too much. Phillip tells us the story of Lack, a hole in the universe opened by an accident of physics, and of the various academics who find themselves drawn in by it pun probably intended. Phillip's lover, Alice, is one such academic. She is a particle physicist who is entranced b Jonathan Lethem's As She Climbed Across the Table is two books in one: a parable about love and obsession, and a sharp satire of academia. She is a particle physicist who is entranced by what she perceives as Lack's personality- that is, his preference for some objects over others, and his seeming rejection of her. As the story progresses her obsession becomes more pronounced and more painful, sending ripples of cause and effect through Phillip and the entire campus as our protagonist tries first to win her back, and then to simply understand. At times, in fact, the satirical elements of the story seemed heavy-handed to me, as though Lethem was just wallowing around and being impressed by his own cleverness. And make no mistake- Lethem is definitely impressed with himself. His writing is showy almost to the point of being irritating, if you're the sort of person who's irritated by that kind of thing. He uses obscure words where perfectly common ones would have been more effective, and his characters occasionally turn into nothing more than mouthpieces for his witty dialogue. When he succeeds he is dazzling, as with some of his subtle reminders that academia always ends up eating itself, and there are enough of these successful moments to keep the reader going. His points are often brought home by the secondary characters, most of whom are more charming and interesting than the protagonist. I was always glad to see Evan and Garth, Lethem's blind Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, make an appearance. I also saw the book billed as a comic novel, but I honestly didn't see it. There are lines and situations that made me chuckle, sure, but they didn't seem to live up to the "laugh out loud hilarious" reviews I'd read. If no one had told me I wouldn't have known that the book was supposed to be comic. Perhaps Lethem didn't know either. The second level of the novel, the part that gets lost, is a story of the people on campus and how they are affected by Lack's arrival. This is the story I thought I was going to be reading when I opened the book, and I ultimately ended up sad when it wasn't there. It covers all the bases- the selfish nature of being in love, obsession, self-image, etc. More than once I found myself wishing that the story was told from Alice's point of view or, honestly, from anyone but Phillip's. But, alas, the book was never supposed to be about this story. It's merely a vehicle for the satire. Had I invested more time, I probably would have been a lot more annoyed. Read it if you enjoy satire more than the average bear, or if you're looking for something quick to fill the space between other books. At the very least it managed to pique my interest in Lethem's other books, and I'm hoping that in his later works he manages to live up to the potential this one showed. I like this bit: "Talk was hopeless. We smiled apologetically, while our words went spilling like platefuls of barbecue sauce onto a white dress in a detergent ad, comical slow-motion disaster. I am entertained. But, seriously, dialogue tags. My kingdom for some dialogue tags. Just the occasional "Alice said" so I know who's speaking, especially if there are more than two people in the scene, e. Like Alice, I may be in love with Lack, in love with nothing. I had hoped for something a bit whimsical. Instead I got heartbreak. But isn't that the way of things? A couple more bits I like: "My grand statement. If only I could reel it back in, swallow it, dissolve it in the acids of my stomach. I yearned, heart big and tender as a ripe eggplant. At the same time I played at indifference, my heart squeezed small and hard as an uncooked chestnut. I'm wanting Philip to choose Cynthia, choose what could be the healthy relationship. But I predict that he won't. He'll choose Alice because Alice is his true love, and it ain't true love if it ain't dysfunctional, right? But will Alice eventually return to him? Can she? Actually, my true prediction is that Philip will jump into Lack and Lack will accept him the way Lack never accepted Alice. I guess I'll have to wait and see what unfolds in the next pages. Still entertained. Another bit I liked, from dialogue spoken by Cynthia: "But while we're on the subject I do want to say I think you're wasting your time pining after a woman who stopped giving you what you need months ago. And you might be ignoring a very interesting alternative. We pine. We yearn. We long. We're never happy with what's in front of us, always grasping for more, for that thing or that person that eludes us. Maybe not everyone, but a good portion of us. Is this something we're conditioned to do? Can we ever break free of this wanting and be happy with what's within our reach? Would we be better off if we could? Perhaps we'd just be more dull if we could be content with what we have, but I think there's a fine line between the kind of wanting that drives us to excel and the kind that drives us to madness. The trick is not slipping into the latter. I was right about Philip going into Lack. But also so very wrong. More Lethem, please. Shelves: literary-fiction , quantum-fiction , speculative-fic-or-light-scifi. This book has everything I usually love. Literary fiction. Weird metaphoric writing. Unrequited love. And yet I hated it. I hated every page, every character, every piece of dialogue. I hated how every line was an unsubtle metaphor, I hated how I couldn't tell if the lack of subtlety was intentional or not. Everyone kept saying things that sounded deep at first pass, but didn't mean anything, just paragraphs of literary nonsense and fake physics. I can tell it's supposed to This book has everything I usually love. I can tell it's supposed to be satire and my friend described it as "fun", but it was too bleak, the people too weak and disturbed, the entire world too skewed. It reminded me of that part of Alice in Wonderland, where Alice goes to the home with the awful pepper cooks and the pig baby that won't stop screaming. I kept waiting for the click, the next chapter, the moment when it would transform into a delight. The story became a meta-representation of my own experience reading it. There had to be something there, something more to all this nothing. I needed it to give me something, to pay back my continued attention, a reward for my diligence. Instead, it just sat on my desk, silent and waiting, until I forced myself to pick it up again. I wanted to be a person who loved this book. I tried harder, forced myself to read it from different perspectives. Nothing worked. I couldn't stop thinking about it, but I felt like I lacked the language necessary to properly articulate my feelings. Then I realized I was acting out the central conceit of the story in an increasingly recursive loop between myself and it, and hated it even more for putting me in a position that forced me to recognize its objective merits. Can a book deserve both one and five stars? Would it even deserve five stars if I could be that person, or am I so fascinated by my own loathing that I've overestimated it's quality? I think I'm projecting all these issues onto something too insubstantial to support them. I don't know. I hated Alice in Wonderland and I hate this book. Nov 05, Rita rated it it was amazing Shelves: my-mirrorbox , the-desert-island-shelf , genre-literary , recommended-for-english-majors , genre-slipstream. Recommended for English major types only. This is a "literary" novel that borrows from science fiction, rather than the other way around. You get sentences like, "the lack was obviously an explosion of metaphor into a literal world," and, "We want to treat Lack as a self-contained text. A sign. We want to read him …" Which isn't a criticism or a particular selling point I love both , more of warning: you have to read it according to the right genre conventions or you'll probably come out hatin Recommended for English major types only. We want to read him …" Which isn't a criticism or a particular selling point I love both , more of warning: you have to read it according to the right genre conventions or you'll probably come out hating it. Tonally, it's a balance of poetic, ironic, and this weirdly restrained hysterical absurdism. I can't stand over-the-top satire; I prefer absurdism delivered with a straight face, and that's what Lethem does. He targets academia with the vitriol and the wry fondness of having been there, done that. This both is and isn't a character-driven novel. Lethem gets zero points for naturalistic, well-rounded character development, but a perfect score for investigating basic conditions of romantic relationships in a way that's thorough, jarring, and honest. I loved that. It's also short and doesn't waste words. In a way, this novel reminds me of Stanislaw Lem's His Master's Voice: academics trying to study a phenomenon that can't be studied, and really only learn the limits of their own knowledge. Jun 28, Cait rated it liked it. This was a thoroughly good novel. As irritated as pseudoscience usually makes me, Lethem did a good job of not taking it seriously enough for me to want to strangle him. Plus some of it was kind of cool - the idea of using nerve-blind people as a unique kind of observer, for example. I wish the book had broken my heart more, but I suppose it's meant to be more funny than heartbreaking. Oct 25, Let's Geek rated it did not like it Shelves: scifi. I probably am too dumb for this book. Heavy on philosophy and science. Did you ever read a book, and once you put it down, you asked yourself: What the hell did I just read? Total Rating: 2. Phillip, a Anthropology professor, tells the story from his point of view. His partner Alice is a particle physicist in the same university. The worlds of humanities and science collide. One day, Professor Soft created some sort of universe, a wormhole in his lab, the centre of the story. This is one of those. And this is not necessarily a bad thing - maybe I AM too dumb. I am sure some people loved and enjoyed it, but I did not get the humour or irony. I was probably too dumb. So you see, the narrating style is very unique. Maybe that is your thing. However, what is inexcusable, is the amount of time people used each other's first names when speaking to each other. I noticed I find it weird calling my husband by his name, because I do it so rarely unless I speak about him. That is how rarely I call him. But here, it is a literal ping ping. I did feel a very complex love story behind the confusing narrative. I was hoping of a short-ish science fiction novel, but ended up with a philosophy and metaphor heavy story that needed complete focus. I can see that others enjoy the prose - but I did not. I was almost annoyed at it, because I felt like I should like it, but I just didn't. I am sure some readers will absolutely adore this book. So if whatever I have said tickles your fancy, you should check it out. Feb 15, Nate D rated it it was ok Recommends it for: Lethem completists. Shelves: sci-fi , read-in A quick two-day break from Ulysses because I didn't want to lug it around by bike last Monday, and was way too underslept for Joyce today. As She Climbed Across the Table is the most and least science-ish of the early quartet of Lethem science fiction novels before he redefined himself with Motherless Brooklyn. Most in that the plot derives from a university physics experiment, and least in that beyond being the catalyst, the science is pretty thin. Either way, it rarely feels like genre fiction A quick two-day break from Ulysses because I didn't want to lug it around by bike last Monday, and was way too underslept for Joyce today. Either way, it rarely feels like genre fiction, and is more directly a satire of academia, and an examination of attachments. Like other Lethem of the era, it's brisk and entertaining, but the more contemporary reality-grounded setting and characters make it somewhat less imaginatively strange and compelling as the work that preceded it. And the endlessly garrulous protagonist, clearly as amused by his own cleverness as Lethem seems to have been when penning his dialogue to be sure, his quips are amusing , can get tiresome. I'm not convinced I'd want to hang out with the guy for long, so I feel somewhat less for his plight. Even so, the novel does get back points where those prior novels did, in following its logic headlong into the utterly bizarre where needed. But then, perhaps it loses points for the attendant lack of restraint. In this case, it's especially glaring, as those bits represent a rather unexpected shift in tone and style. Aug 01, David Rim rated it liked it. I'm not one of those people who read every book by my favorite authors, although I probably should. Having loved both 'Motherless Brooklyn' and 'Fortress of Solitude' and I seriously mean loved , I really couldn't resist this post-modern love story with Lethem's attendant literary trickery. The story is a bizarre love triangle, with the twist that the third side is represented by a curious cosmological entity named only "Lack. There is so much going I'm not one of those people who read every book by my favorite authors, although I probably should. There is so much going on here, it's dizzying. And because of that its just too much. A breezy style hides the complexity, but there's just a bit of unfocusedness that makes this not-quite-a-gem. Dec 05, Briane Pagel rated it it was ok. Both of them wait, here's the clever bit are about nothing, after all: As She Climbed is about a woman who falls in love with a black hole, while Jim's Journal is a comic strip about more or less nothing at all: the minutiae of Jim's life, literally: in many strips he talks about cooking a hot dog, or watching It occurred to me as I got ready to write this post that As She Climbed Across The Table and The Pretty Good Jim's Journal Treasury are actually flip sides of the same storytelling coin. Both of them wait, here's the clever bit are about nothing, after all: As She Climbed is about a woman who falls in love with a black hole, while Jim's Journal is a comic strip about more or less nothing at all: the minutiae of Jim's life, literally: in many strips he talks about cooking a hot dog, or watching his cat play with a leaf. What makes them so interesting is how the two entirely-disparate works demonstrate good and bad writing -- As She Climbed being mostly bad in a way and Jim being somehow mostly good. At the outset of the story, a colleague of Alice's creates a sort of universe that 'fails to detach,' and creates a black hole of sorts in the lab: it doesn't suck everything in, but selectively takes some things and not others. Alice, studying it, falls in love with the black hole and out of love with Phillip, and the story is mostly Phillip's attempts to understand what is going on. Jim's Journal meanwhile is the story of Jim, a quiet guy who goes to college, then graduates maybe? Eventually Jim gets married and then goes to work at a grocery store. Recurring characters include Jim's college roommates Tony and Steve, and a couple of coworkers and classmates and a few of Jim's relatives. The shtick, as it were, for Jim, is that the comic is adamantly about nothing: There's lots more than that. So the thing is, Jim's Journal is actually more Because with As She Climbed, for most of the book, I found myself not really caring about what happened to those people. Part of it may simply be the characters. A book of compelling ideas, of intellectual conflict, of human frailty and desire. He is rapidly evolving into his own previously uncataloged species. When you buy a book, we donate a book. Sign in. The Best Books of So Far. Feb 24, ISBN Add to Cart. Also available from:. Apr 06, ISBN Available from:. Audiobook Download. Paperback —. Also in Vintage Contemporaries. Also by Jonathan Lethem. See all books by Jonathan Lethem. Product Details. Inspired by Your Browsing History. Roadside Picnic. Boris Strugatsky and Arkady Strugatsky. Rule Charles Stross. Quantum Night. Robert J. The Crimson Labyrinth. Yusuke Kishi. The Book of Malachi. The Breach. Connie Willis. Asaf Ashery. World War Z.

Jonathan Lethem: As She Climbed Across the Table

Alice's estrangement from Philip and his own desire to retain her are signs of their seeking their own identity. Both characters are as blind to themselves as Evan and Garth, the two blind men Alice invites to move in with Philip, are to their surroundings. In one notable scene, Philip even goes so far as to adopt a personality completely unrelated to the academic he really is, claiming, instead, to be a consultant to identify Nobel quality research. Perhaps my biggest complaint about this novel has nothing to do with Lethem at all. His first three books have amazingly evocative covers, from the beaten-up detective novel look of Gun, With Occasion Music to the Old Road Side appearance of Amnesia Moon. In moving from a smaller publisher to Doubleday, Lethem's cover art seems to suffer from a desire to push him into the mainstream. I picked up this novel intending only to read a few pages before going to bed. By the time I forced myself to put it down, I had read more than half the book, anxious to be able to return to Lethem's university and knowing the novel was too short. Lethem's novels and short stories, one of which is a Nebula nominee continue to get better. With luck, he'll have a long, productive literary life. Sarah Pinborough. Aye, and Gomorrah. Samuel R. The Word Exchange. Alena Graedon. A Scanner Darkly. Philip K. The Swimmers. Marian Womack. The Female Man. The Rapture. Phase Six. Body of Stars. Laura Maylene Walter. A Working Theory of Love. Scott Hutchins. The Rise of Io. Peter Straub. Adrian Barnes. Dark Eden. Chris Beckett. Steven Amsterdam. The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe. The Foundation Pit. Andrey Platonov. The War of the Givens. Daniel Price. Related Articles. Looking for More Great Reads? Download Hi Res. Before he can really respond, Alice has moved out of their flat to set up a hour watch on a physics experiment which has created a void, a hole in the universe: something, at any rate, which makes things disappear and reappear - who knows where; perhaps in parallel invisible universes. Cue scenes of Philip in the other woman's office in the middle of the night, being told to relax. It's just buried under layers of incredulity and panic. But underneath those I'm very relaxed. With a sickening jolt, Philip is returned to the maelstrom of individual consciousness, trying to get a grip on a reality which, as quantum physics has taught us, cannot be fixed without an observer and which is always affected by that observer. This way, ladies and gentlemen, for the epistemological minefield. First exhibit: dark matter. Physicists know that 90 per cent of the matter in the universe must exist - otherwise, none of their equations would balance. The only problem is that it is impossible to detect; it just has to be taken on trust until the right experiments come along. In a similar admirable spirit of bloody-mindedness, Philip doesn't want to understand why Alice has gone; he just wants her back. https://files8.webydo.com/9589727/UploadedFiles/DDE2C567-DB79-5AE1-EC8D-FE1AF06DDC5B.pdf https://files8.webydo.com/9586226/UploadedFiles/ED639D95-173B-DA32-A656-21B06F4F1821.pdf https://files8.webydo.com/9586746/UploadedFiles/2C437475-86C8-975D-BF11-FA31367D338D.pdf https://files8.webydo.com/9591845/UploadedFiles/2A1D13EE-4F1F-67BE-2363-0DB059D9D03C.pdf