Our Tragic Universe
Ratings8
Average rating3
15
Ratings8
Average rating3
This “delightfully whimsical novel riffs on the premise that ordinary lives stubbornly resist the tidy order that a fiction narrative might impose on them” (Publishers Weekly). Can a story save your life? Meg Carpenter is broke. Her novel is years overdue. Her cell phone is out of minutes. And her moody boyfriend’s only contribution to the household is his sour attitude. So she jumps at the chance to review a pseudoscientific book that promises life everlasting. But who wants to live forever? Consulting cosmology and physics, tarot cards, koans (and riddles and jokes), new-age theories of everything, narrative theory, Nietzsche, Baudrillard, and knitting patterns, Meg wends her way through Our Tragic Universe, asking this and many other questions. Does she believe in fairies? In magic? Is she a superbeing? Is she living a storyless story? And what’s the connection between her off-hand suggestion to push a car into a river, a ship in a bottle, a mysterious beast loose on the moor, and the controversial author of The Science of Living Forever? Smart, entrancing, and boiling over with Thomas’s trademark big ideas, Our Tragic Universe is a book about how relationships are created and destroyed, how we can rewrite our futures (if not our histories), and how stories just might save our lives.
Reviews with the most likes.
OH, bloody hell. First, the more I thought about the previous book, the more irked I became. But it wasn't completely without merit. This one, though...It was the single most pretentious soap opera I've ever read. My hopes weren't too high. But still. The blurb on the back of this little tosser makes it seem really quite high-minded. It's not. It's just how much can Ms. Thomas tell you about all the ingenius stuff she knows–and she knits too! Whoopee.
No plot, lame characters, stupidly long bits with babbling philosophizing, and a very random Beast of Dartmoor–which, frankly, amounts to practically nothing, although it is virtually the only plot point in the book. So...goodness. I can't even form a cohesive thought right now, I'm so irked at this book. The gimmick of the storyless story is perhaps not meant to be in book form. If it is, it should be handled by a more capable writer. Not a glorified chicklit writer.
