On Jul 14, 2009, at 10:37 AM, Nick Arnett wrote:
"Anathem" struck me as somewhat desperate in its invention of language, but it all made sense in the end. I'm not sure the book deserved to be so long, but on the other hand, I was never particularly tempted to give up on it. Stephenson knows how to keep the suspense up.
The thing I enjoyed most about Anathem was the way the world of the story itself shifted as the story progressed, and the way it kept surprising me even in spite of the numerous clues dropped along the way. The best kind of surprise, for me, is a kind of paraprosdokian, where the story is leading toward what looks like a familiar path but takes an intriguing left turn right when you least expect it to and the unexpected direction is the one that makes the most sense after you recover from the surprise. And Anathem is definitely full of those. :)
The language seemed to be Stephenson's solution to the problem of how to tell a story in an alien universe where the language naturally wouldn't be intelligible to us at all otherwise, and I thought it was about as good a solution to that problem as any, and a little more honest than most in that it captured at least a little of the difference in thought processes that stem from different language without going so far into the language as to distract from the story. It's a fundamentally non-trivial (and quite difficult) problem that I thought he solved at least well enough to not bother me. (I'm something of an anomaly that way, though, as my brain tends to build its own dictionary somewhat dynamically and I'm used to following unusual linguistic usage.) If I say much more than that I'll spoil the story for those who haven't read it ..
"Almost nothing that trickles down is fit to consume." -- Davidson Loehr _______________________________________________ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
