Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Quirky read, 26 Jun 2008
This is a wonderful quirky book about the life of Nikola Tesla, an eccentric inventor with OCD and a germ phobia. He never married, having only ever loved one woman and she was the wife of his best friend. Hunt tells us about his life and how he meets Louisa, a chambermaid at the hotel in which he lives. The two become firm friends and tell each other their deepest thoughts and secrets. Louisa lives with her father, who is still in love with his wife, who died 25 years ago. Into Louisa's life comes Arthur, who appears to have come from the future. This all sounds a tad complicated, and at times it does take some concentrating on, but somehow Hunt makes it all flow and the storyline swept me along effortlessly. Hunt's style of writing is colourful and descriptive, bringing alive the sights and sounds of New York in the 1940's. She has created a wonderful book, filled with possibilities and magical dreams. I loved the way her story is littered with literary quotations and peopled by historical characters. She has blended together fact and fiction, magic with realism, life and death, the past and the future to create a marvellous world of her own invention.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you?
 
|
|
|
|
|
|
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Fascinating, often brilliantly inventive book... but ultimately infuriating , 13 July 2008
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Programme (What's this?)
This looked right up my street. It was described in various places as weird and wonderful, uplifting, original...and a `biographically accurate' (this from the publisher) look at the life of Nikola Tesla, real-life scientist, genius and extremely naïve businessman.
Nowadays he's no more than a footnote in the lives of other more celebrated names like Edison and Marconi. But Tesla invented AC electrical power before Edison took credit for bringing electricity to the world. And he formulated the principles of radio transmission years before Marconi's patent. He was the original mad scientist with many ideas ahead of his time - including a lot of crackpot ones - and he suffered from psychological disorders such as OCD and germ phobia. He inspired various cults throughout his life: some thought he came from Venus, others that he came from the future. He was celebrated, ridiculed, reviled, considered dangerous even. A worthy subject for a great novel then, you would have thought.
Unfortunately this isn't it.
The core story depicts Tesla in 1945, an octogenarian coming to the end of his days in a big New York Hotel where he's several years behind with his bill payments. A pigeon lover, he's befriended by a snooping young hotel chambermaid and fellow pigeon fancier, Louisa. He still experiments and maintains a laboratory of sorts in his room and at one stage he shorts all the electrical power within the hotel. Even at his advanced age he's still considered subversive and is being investigated by an unnamed government agency.
The interaction between Louisa and Tesla provides the book with some of its most touching scenes, and this is all well and good. However, I kept wanting the book to settle into a linear narrative and I was disappointed: it is too unfocussed and flits about all over the place.
For example, during the course of ` The Invention of Everything Else', we go back into Tesla's past: back to the 1890s when as a young engineering graduate, he's scammed by Edison into putting Edison's commercial laboratory in order for a promised, but not delivered fee. Further back to his birth in Serbia and the early death of his brilliant, talented elder brother, for which he'll always carry guilt. Back to episodes from various periods involving his friends Robert and Katherine - which Louisa reads about when looking over the private papers he stores in his hotel room. In addition to this we also establish Louisa's back-story... and her father, Walter's.
This is all very infuriating, and the novel for me, entirely loses its way amid all the flashbacks and sub-plots. It's far too patchy, and while undoubtedly containing plenty of original ideas and passages of astonishing writing of great beauty and insight, it doesn't form a cohesive whole.
For example, at one stage Tesla is still meeting, and confiding in his great friend Sam Clemens (i.e. Samuel Langhorne Clemens - Mark Twain). But this is 1945 and by that time Twain had been dead 20 years...
And a time machine makes its appearance. This is an invention of Azor, an old friend of Louisa's father, but he gets some help in fixing it from Arthur, Louisa's sort-of boyfriend who remembers Louisa from school - although she doesn't remember him. Azor wants to take Tesla to the future where he feels his ideas belong. During a `test drive' - pursued by the army, Azor and Walter seem to travel back in time, and then forward, again. Or do they? This is never fully explained to my satisfaction. And what does it all mean anyway? Throw in a couple of passages of magical realism, and you have one big melting pot of too many ideas and styles.
Like I said earlier, this has all the ingredients to be a great story, and author Samantha Hunt is an undeniably gifted writer. Instead it all ends unsatisfactorily and is structurally a bit of a mess. A difficult novel to read, but not for the right reasons, it nevertheless enthralled and frustrated me in equal measure. But I cannot deny that the author's prose soars in one or two places.
To award a novel of such high purpose less than 3 stars would be an insult to the authors' skill. And I know a lot of people will love this novel, even if I didn't quite grasp the significance of it all.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you?
|
|
|
|
|
|
6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Not for me, 28 Aug 2008
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Programme (What's this?)
After two outings I'm afraid this book still remains unfinished and I won't be going back for a third time. I'd been reading about Nikola Tesla in another fiction book just before embarking on this one. I thought that would've made this a more rewarding read, it didn't. I loved the concept for this book, learning about Tesla through Louisa's life. This sounded clever and promising but because Tesla is mainly an unknown quantity then the reader doesn't know where truth ends and literay licence begins.
I didn't feel her insistence on so much detail had a place in this novel. Superb for descriptive writing but it didn't fit here. Maybe I would try something else by her as I think she has a potential as a writer for the style of books I would usually read but it just seemed lost in this one. I personally think she's tried to tackle too many different styles and genres in this novel with a result in that it's a like a dinner party. You don't know who's bringing what to the table. Take a look at an extract and if you can get through that then this may be a book for you. On this occasion it wasn't one for me.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you?
|
|
|
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
by Ellen Feldman
by Deirdre Madden
by Samantha Harvey
by Kamila Shamsie
by Marilynne Robinson
