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A fascinating utopian style novel about a Prince who seeks immortality by creating a perfect city. However, in the light of the reality that this perfect city was not achievable, the Prince withdraws into a dream world, continuing to bankrupt the treasury by enlisting designs to create further perfect cities, that exist only on paper and in the mind of its creators.
Rreinnstadt is the fourth city to be created and the one in which a thrilling story unfolds about the entanglement of the lives of two of the city's creators and a fictional inhabitant: "Pfitz" who disappears one night from a tavern in Rreinnstadt. In discovering what has happened to Pfitz, the reader is challenged regarding where the line between reality and fiction lies and even regarding the very existence of such a line.
Pfitz is a superb tale of a man involved in the creation of the perfect city, who falls in love with a biographer and is led into a complex situation involving murder, romance and jealousy. I was so hooked to it I read it in one day, which just shows the addictiveness of the book. The perfect city has to have everything planned to the tiniest detail, and this is reflected in Crumey's narrative technique as every moment in the book is described to the tiniest detail. Well worth a read.
A great wee book, I got drawn into the story quickly and never looked back.
The style changes as it moves between the stories in the stories, which not only makes it more intriguing, as you try to work out just what is real in all this, but a great read too.
I felt like my mind was being turned inside out at the end. Not as unpleasant an experience as it might sound.
If it sounds a bit dry, it's not. It's nominally set in some bit of middle europe a few hundred years ago, but it feels like it's another world altogether.