Book of Numbers

by Joshua Cohen

The enigmatic billionaire founder of Tetration, the world’s most powerful tech company, hires a failed novelist, Josh Cohen, to ghostwrite his memoirs. This tech mogul, known as Principal, brings Josh behind the digital veil, tracing the rise of Tetration, which started in the earliest days of the Internet by revolutionizing the search engine before venturing into smartphones, computers, and the surveillance of American citizens. Principal takes Josh on a mind-bending world tour from Palo Alto to Dubai and beyond, initiating him into the secret pretext of the autobiography project and the life-or-death stakes that surround its publication.

Insider tech exposé, leaked memoir-in-progress, international thriller, family drama, sex comedy, and biblical allegory, Book of Numbers renders the full range of modern experience both online and off. Embodying the Internet in its language, it finds the humanity underlying the virtual.

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Novels, Literature, Literary Fiction, American, Technology

580 pages, Hardcover

First published June 4, 2015

About the author

Joshua Aaron Cohen (born September 6, 1980 in New Jersey) is an American novelist and writer of stories.

Reviews

[Donald · Rating 5 out of 5]

1) None of the people giving this bad reviews here have read the whole book and/or they are incapable of reading serious literature at all (see: the reviewer who confuses the 'racist' ideas of characters with the ideas of the author [doing her own bit of quasi-racist thing with a veiled anti-Jewish comment about Brooklyn] OR the other reviewer who complains about being forced to expand her vocabulary).

2) This is an ambitious novel, and it is very good. My bias is to like ambitious books more than I probably should, out of admiration for the writer aiming high, even if unsuccessfully (see: Norman Mailer). But I don't think that's what's going on here. Cohen aims high and pulls it off. He writes about the contemporary world, which is a lot harder than writing about the past or future, and he manages to do it in a way that isn't boring or hackneyed.

3) If you read a review of this novel that does not mention the character Moe, know that the reviewer did not actually read the book. Moe is one of the best characters to appear in an American novel in a long time. The post-poker universal remote escapade is just fantastic, but I don't think I've seen it mentioned in a single review.

4) It's possible that not a single reviewer read the book, even the professional reviewers who wrote positive reviews. One of the tragedies is that the Joshua Cohen is one of the few people capable of reviewing the thing. I hope NYRB runs something thorough.

5) Anyone who cares about contemporary literature, all 5000 of us, should have bought this damn book already. Read it before the new Vollmann comes out at the end of July.

[Snotchocheez · Rating 1 out of 5]

1.5 stars

I can't say that Book of Numbers was a disappointment (that 2.93 kept my expectations low) but the handful of folks that lauded this thing like it was some kind of 'Ulysses Meets the Internet Age' drew me to see what I was missing out on. I was not prepared, though, for this barely readable, technobabbly mess Joshua Cohen foisted upon us. I don't want to waste a bunch of time writing about a book I almost completely hated, but a few things:

Without question, Cohen is an intelligent guy, probably as bright as the authors he's likened to (Pynchon, Roth, DF Wallace, Joyce, et.al.), and he certainly is conversant in most anything related to computing (especially the Internet) and the World of Judaica, and can drop €50 words like nobody's business, but what he can't figure out is how to engage a reading audience. This entire book comes off as a faux-enlightened exercise in narcissism (deluding editors into giving the guy free reign rein rain to deluge the pages with whatever nonsense comes to his mind, and then labelling it Pynchon-esque to sucker in those who can't discern the difference). In the world of zeros and ones, Cohen's The Book of Numbers seems stuck at zero.


Oh, and this is for you Cohen cheerleaders who a) think striking through page after page of text and then leaving it for us to cull through is groundbreaking and artistic and b) think that no person who's read this the entire way through could possibly rate this negatively: A) It's not at all groundbreaking, or artistic, or even clever. and B) I'm embarrassed to report that I read this to its bitter end. Trust me, if you felt like abandoning this novel at the 25% mark, it only gets worse from there. Don't bother wasting your time.

Oh yeah, if it seems like I'm angered by this book...yeah, I guess I am. Not only for the wasted time of reading a 600 page cipher (and reviewing same), but for the planting the "Lynch-Rimming" image in my head. Thanks but no thanks, Cohen..

[BlackOxford · Rating 4 out of 5]

Azoy ir viln tsu vern a shreyber?
(So You Want To Be A Writer?)

It’s a bit like being a farmer (watch the analogies flow like rain here; or, better yet, like a never failing stream; much more biblical). You invest in your land and pick your crop. Then you work and re-work it until it’s ready to harvest. If you’re lucky, the rains hold off just long enough to get it undercover at the coop grain silo. After that, world affairs take over - if the harvest in Patagonia or Szechuan has been good (or some clown in the government pisses off some parallel foreign clown), selling prices drop through the floor, the mortgage goes unpaid, and you end up as a hired hand on someone’s else’s pig plantation or, worse, commuting to the city doing stuff you really hate.

For historical reasons (you know what they are), there aren’t a lot of Jewish farmers (or police detectives funny enough). But there are a not inconsiderable number of Jewish writers (maybe literature is the Jewish agriculture). Joshua Cohen, both the author of Book of Numbers and two of the book’s characters, is one such Jewish writer who knows the farmer’s angst. After finally getting into print with a notable publisher, his book launch gets gazumped by the 9/11 destruction. So no publicity, no reviews, and few sales. He ends up in a 20 foot by 20 foot unconverted loft under the BQE (downmarket even for a hometown Secaucus boy, not that New Yorkers would ever agree Jersey could be superior in anything, even slums), crafting (or maybe crofting) phoney travel brochures and right-wing anti-Semitic propaganda. Gotta eat, no?

Not the end of the tsouris though (it never is). His mentor is killed in the grit-filled streets of lower Manhattan after the Towers collapsed; his agent, her wealthy brother, eventually drifts away from the literary sharecropper; and, oh yes, the missus kicks him out after Pesach Seder aggro, with the blessings of her mother. So he’s willing to take any bait that dangles itself into the watery depths of his misery (which are about as murky as the Gowanus Canal), specifically the biography of a tech mogul with the same name. The temptation to forgo his daily tuna on rye for some caviar blinis is irresistible. Of course there is no free lunch. But he can’t give up “that unshakeable Jew belief in continuity, narrative, plot…” Tradition is not to be scoffed, particularly in non-traditional prose.

The three JC’s make a formidable ensemble (I know, I know, I’m mixing metaphors here, do try to keep up). Clocking who’s playing what and why can be taxing but after the first few hundred pages you get that it doesn’t matter. There is a choice to be made though. Do you revel in the wordplay (I’m thinking J. Joyce here); try to catch the obscure references to religion, culture, and the inner workings of quantum computers (and about who’s screwing who in techno land); take time to appreciate the very weird psychology of the JC’s and everyone they come in contact with (manic, egotistical, uncivilised); or just go with the flow of the story and its possible significance in one’s life (guidance counsellors, read this before sending kids into the maw of The Industry)? Doing all these simultaneously is just not possible with an IQ less than Bobby Fisher (another notable local boy). Doing them sequentially is probably a doctoral dissertation, and these tend to have less success than asparagus farms in Alberta.


Postscript: To my dismay I discovered that many other GR readers unfavourably compare Book of Numbers to Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge. While the subject, technological culture, is the same in both, and the shared style of wordiness approaching logorrhoea is obvious, each is of an entirely distinct genre. It is here that my agricultural (or horticultural, if you prefer) analogy shows its usefulness.

Literary soil, as it were, with the kind of nutrient base of the two books ranges from that of high-acidity sarcasm, to a more neutral irony, and thence to a low ph (that is to say, high alkalinity) satire.

Sarcasm rages, mocks, and corrodes, even while it pretends to do the opposite. Satire celebrates, exaggerates, and builds extravagantly in order to accomplish the same end. Pynchon is acidly sarcastic; Cohen is satirically alkaline.

QED it is improper as well as futile to compare the two works. They are meant for different crops entirely. I hope this clears matters up in a neutral, that is to say, ironic fashion.

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

Joshua Cohen’s Book of Numbers may well be the only hot ticket/hot number I read this year. Leon Forrest’s Divine Days and Schmidt’s Abend mit Goldrand just arrived and I doubt very much whether anything being published this year and flirting with The Millions and/or the NYT’s Breast=selling list will come anywheres near touching either of these two BURIED works of GENIUS. But I could be wrong.

Cohen I got curious about because he had published a first novel, a FAT novel, with Dalkey Archive, and one doesn’t really do that unless it’s the right kind of novel. It sits on my shelf still unread ; but Book of Numbers I had to read while it was still hot because there’s a number of NetGalley readers here on gr who are pretentious enough to call emperor’s new clothes on Cohen’s new book (really, though, I’m disturbed by the condemnation of a novel because a narrator is “racist and misogynistic”). But the second reason I’m interested in Cohen is what Friend MJ says about that first Cohen novel, Witz. Thirdly, Cohen once teamed up with Joseph McElroy and exchanged readings of each other’s work. McElroy endorsement is a kind of sacred seal or something (probably ambiguously). (can’t seem to find that video anymore). But those one=stars? They demonstrate the obscenity of star=ratings and even more the obscenity of the belief that an ‘average rating’ has any meaning (connotative or denotative) whatsoever. Remember, the act of judgement runs two-ways.

So I’m still really looking forward to Witz.

[in which names are dropped carelessly] I gave up on Neal Stephenson after having gotten back into reading via and having thoroughly enjoyed his Baroque Tetrology ; but gave up after his two post=Baroque thoroughly bored me. I mean, he can write adequately, but like all sci-fi/genre writers, he’s more interested in ‘ideas’ than in writing, in tending to the words on the page etc. So his Seveneves is not a hot ticket/hot number I’ll be reading (I actually paid to hear him read from Reamde which is kind of obscene, paying to hear an author promote his already over=read novel). So but anyways, some of the stuff I used to get from Stephenson I got from this Cohen here ; smart stuff, beach reading, no brain pain. But with the added thing that Cohen is a post=Infinite Jest writer.

Post=Infinite Jest? James Wood--I’ve read very little of his stuff, lots of my Friends have read him and read him frequently, but he’s not in my realm (of Moore-McCaffery-LeClair-ETC), but he did do that one thing--once called Zadie Smith’s White Teeth ‘hysterical realism.’ Which is just brilliant. Book of Numbers is hysterical realism. If we keep in mind that the subject position of the hysteric is its question “Che vuoi?”, What do you want (from me)? But I disagree with Wood’s lineage -- I’d place the burgeoning of hysterical realism, not in DeLillo and Pycnhon (its forebears to use a patriarchal metaphor) but with Infinite Jest, which perhaps poses the question “Che vuoi?” as well as anything. So Cohen’s novel isn’t so much pomo or post=pomo or whatever, but post=Infinite Jest (yes, a watershed novel like Ulysses and Gravity’s Rainbow (and Don Quixote) -- and it functions well in this lineage. But it doesn’t break into anything new like Women and Men etc does, totally reshifting the possibilities within the genre of novel.

And I’m always looking for that one novel that does something really novel again. Which is asking too much ; like asking about another Shakespeare to shake up the English language ; or another Dante to tie all of the globally varying Englishes into one globe=spanning masterwork. Cohen’s book also suffers in my reading it after Forrest and Self ; the former doing the glacial prose like only Gass does and the later really pushing several novelistic aspects into really rather incredibly sophisticated crevices. But, when I set him next to a Stephenson (my gripes are mine own) he shines as one who not only enjoys the words on the page and the variety in which they can be set down, but also has the talent and the chutzpah to just go ahead and do it. Why read an author who doesn’t/can’t fuck around with words?

So and too, a few more names to drop. This is an internet novel. Also, a little bit of post 9/11. And there’s a major portion of it devoted to The Richest Man in the World kind of protag. So as to the first, you get things like Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge (and Cohen holds his own here), Egger’s thing I didn’t read, and of course that Stephenson stuff about the internetz, but I think Cohen is much smarter, at least in the precision of geekdom, in letting the learnedness and totally=tech stuff seep into the novel. As to the second, I dunno, I’m not really keen on the whole 9/11 thing ; piece of propaganda you ask me, but I’ve never been a NY’er, nor had my family obliterated by a drone=strike or Israeli incursion. What’s daily life in much of the world is..... never mind. But I can mention “DeLillo” here because I’ve read his 9/11 novel (I don’t think it can be named in a neutral manner). Thirdly there, again with The World’s Richest man protag, I’ve gotta call to mind again DeLillo’s Cosmopolis. So but I do think Cohen comparisons belong in this realm.

I still don’t really know what kind of a brain=breaker his Witz is, and I’m holding out for its being so, but this Book of Numbers is not a brain=breaker ; but neither is Pynchon’s internet novel.

And finally, we need to address the fact that the novel is framed as a first person narrative, which is deadly in anything longer than 30 pages -- literally deadly if you take a body=count of the fallout from those enamored of Holden’s voice. So unless you are a Gass, please do not write a novel of 600 pages in first person. So I say that this novel is framed in the first person. There are several means which Cohen employs to relieve us of the irritation of f=p. The entire middle third of the novel is taken up by the autobiographical bits of the protag’s object -- ie, [you’ve seen this in other reviews] novelist Joshua Cohen (to whom Random House writes royalty checks) writes a novel featuring a protag (Josh Cohen) who is ghost=writing the autobiography of The Richest Man in the World (Joshua Cohen). And the final third consists largely of emails and blogs written by other characters. In other words, its got the poly=lingual dance, the dialogical dingle=dangle which a straight f=p narrative would scarcely allow. In other words, when a novel changes gears like this one right here, reading to page 100 isn’t a ‘taste’ of the novel.

Summing up. Not the novel which would meet my ridiculous criteria of that thing fresh, new, innovative, never done before (which just don’t happen that often and most of them that did that are BURIED, so since that’s the thing I look for I spend more time with the BURIED than I do with the next hot number/hot ticket). BUT, it’s another nice=nice entry in that post=IJ tradition which I just eat up because I like my novels hysterical.

[Perry · Rating 1 out of 5]

Le romancier pense que sa merde ne pue pas.
Cohen is no doubt clever, "but sometimes his brains go to his head."

Deify pompous, elitist Ivy Leaguers?
You might love this novel.

I find literary haughtiness tedious and vexatious, and the writing in this novel is the literary equivalent of a Benzo-Nyquil cocktail.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 5 out of 5]

The supersonically skilled word-spinner, whose incredible novel Witz (although overlong and insufferable) showed the young man’s smarts with language to have almost no limits, has managed to combine his torrential lexicon with something approaching a “plot”, and secure well-deserved mainstream attention. For those Witz-lovers, or those who read his prolific previous (two novels, a story collections, and chapbooks precede this epic monstrosity), worried about a dilution of ambition or language for the masses, these concerns can be parked in a bog. The same manic rhythm and swinging swagger is apparent in the first 100+ pages of this breathtaking novel, the only notable concession the increase in paragraph breaks. Cohen has managed to shirk the thickets of opaque wtf as present in his previous books, and keep the reader on board with the hypermanic chicanery across the turbulant tripartite meta-antics, recounting fictional versions of Cohen as an older writer, and a tech-founder responsible for a Googleesque net phenom. The range of formal play, punnilingual wizardry, and scope of erudition and research seals Cohen’s reputation as the one and only heir apparent to DFW.

[L.S. Popovich · Rating 5 out of 5]

A masterpiece. Relentlessly clever. The demented techno wordplay will ripple into the future, endlessly perplexing jaundiced, crusty historians of so-called traditional literature as it astounds and speaks to every savvy and savage child of our screen-dependent age.

A big book of inside jokes, which, in DFW-fashion, elicits a gut-reaction on every page via the reflexive verbal elbowing the reader receives from the author. The biggest workout for my Kindle's touch-definition function since I-really-don't-know. After scouring the Internet for obscurities and unearthing passive, yet scathing intellectual personas, Cohen's abrasive literary gimcracks metamorphose into gymnastic prose, sprinkled - no, lathered with so many jargon-toffees that you will suffer neologistic dry heaves. Get comfortable with your mind's perpetual reeling so that the momentum it generates can propel you headlong through the novel, barreling out the other side, still insatiably longing for more. However, where does brilliance end and indulgence begin? Haven't we had enough writers writing about writers resembling themselves, living out their fictional fantasies in scarcely veiled pseudo-fictional accounts? Luckily, Cohen's voice, while too clever for its own good, is personable to the point of undeniable familiarity, and his satire is aimed at exactly the type of weiners he envies.

Yet, are we supposed to excavate the ironies, searching for a semblance of truth in his account of corporate cesspools, technocracies, etc. or take his power fantasy at face value, his rampant sarcasms and viral wordplay as illusive chimeras of his inner Paul Auster?

[Zach · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thoughts about this masterpiece that are not actually about this masterpiece:
1. Goodreads / NetGalley / Publishers must stop sending galleys/pre-release copies of books to people in exchange for an "honest review." The "honest reviews" piling up here like dead leaves in a gutter that give the book "1 star." The reviewers openly acknowledging having read "like maybe 100 pages" which means "like maybe the first six paragraphs." The "reviewers" attacking the author for "trying to make them feel stupid." (As if an author who can make one feel stupid isn't actually accomplishing something real and important.) What good does it do Random House to send a book like this to an arbitrarily chosen cadre of "readers?" Why not dig through Goodreads and find people who've loved his previous work? Or why not just let those of us who seek out "difficult" fiction find it and then review it? Because this book is not a "1-star" book. In any world.

2. The first review in the New York Times (by Dwight Garner) does justice to this magnificent book.

3. The second review in the New York Times (by "blogger" turned "novelist" Mark Sarvas) does injustice to books and book reviews. Sarvas complains that the female characters are not given enough "justice" as characters. I refer Sarvas to Marilynne Robinson's masterpiece, "Housekeeping." A book in which there are no male characters who have more than a passing importance beyond the seventh page. And a book that says more about the masculine and man's role in society than just about any book published in the past 100 years. Which proves, I suppose, that a book need not have male characters and that a book with no male characters can still say something meaningful/powerful/beautiful about men. Plus vice versa.

Having only a few female characters in a book about two men who are about as hapless when it comes to connecting with the world as any two men in history (Principal is sexless; his mother and his mother's lover are vividly portrayed but not obsessed over/with in a narrative choice I personally find challenging and masterful. The Other Joshua Cohen is a lout who thinks women are there for sex and to ruin his life which makes him a character who would probably not allow the women in his life to have "justice." Which is probably why the full excerpts from Rachel's blog that anchor the last 50 pages of the text are so powerful; Josh is not giving his wife any credit because he's never given anyone any credit) is a perfectly reasonable narrative decision. Should every book about human beings be equally weighted between genders? Is that Sarvas' goal? So I can take a gauge like the thing they measure crab with on a crab boat and determine the distribution of characters per novel? Is that the end goal?

And then he says "there's always a Jewish mother," which makes me think he didn't actually read the whole book, just skipped ahead to that part where Josh's mother comes back to the narrative which happens to be a few pages before the end. As Josh's mother is oft-mentioned in his interior monologue (much in the way Howard Stern's mother is always there as he speaks) but is never fully-formed.

4. In a book full of beautiful passages, this one: "Even the simplest program must accomplish two things. It has to make something happen, and then it has to store the making of that something happen to memory. The vent, and then its memorial. Its marks, signs, indicia. But this function ensured that the reporting was not stored. That it was forgotten, by us, as like it had never transpired. All of our amnesia had been ordered by a single conciliable command/statement, which though it could negate everything, could not negate itself."

Or this one: "Moe claimed life open and we claimed life closed but neither is feasible because there are cows in the road. You can go and then smack. There is a cow. In the river of the road. You have to wait. You wait to cross. Basically at that point it ends."

I can see how a reader raised on "not-so-difficult" fiction might find that "difficult." No, I can't.

5. I can't "recommend" this book. Mostly because I know there are people who don't have the patience for it. But if you love literature. Then yes. I'll heartily so.

[Jonfaith]

This is the bread of affliction. Eli Eli lama shavaktani? Father, Father, why didn’t Christ quote the Psalms in Hebrew—was he that inept, or does excruciation always call for the vernacular?

This isn't for most people. Even the intrepid biosphere of goodreads will find this alarming, if not unnecessary. I do appreciate Cohen's project, even if it is maddening. There is a dash of Trollope, lanced with Sade, pushing a ready mirror to our media-drunk rictus. The result isn't pretty.

Technology has a taxonomy and a mantra: creations abound and the flesh is made manifest. There are times when the ontology of a search engine is almost repugnant to read about. I likely wouldn't have finished this if it weren't the holidays. I should thank my sister. Her stilted rant against a living wage wedged me away. A younger Jon would have advised her to fuck a goat. The weary 2015 model took refuge in this book and asked kindly if his wife would drive them home.

[Yukari Watanabe · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was so excited to receive NetGalley copy because it received a Starred review from Publishers' Weekly.

Unfortunately, I soon realized this novel is not for me. I was constantly reminded by the author that I am not worthy of his novel.

I'm sorry that I'm not one of Manhattan intellectuals. I'm sorry I couldn't laugh when it's supposed to be funny. I am a poor country bumpkin who stumbled into a very fashionable Manhattan party wearing a hand-me-down flower pattern dress.

But, I have a feeling it's quite a good literately fiction. It may even be nominated for Man Booker Prize. Because I often have similar hostility towards some of the nominated books.

[Barry Pierce · Rating 3 out of 5]

how can one novel be this fascinating and this exhausting

[Blair · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fucking frustrating, offensive, but a masterpiece.

[Suzanne · Rating 1 out of 5]

I think one or more of the Joshua Cohens really loves to write but holds his readers in very low regard. This never-ending exercise holds some gems within it, but they are so cleverly disguised and concealed within a monstrous text, that merely interested and patient readers will miss them. Only the most fanatic readers, or possibly best friends, relatives and fictional readers of the Joshua Cohens will love this book. The rest of us will feel sad and disappointed that so much talent is wasted.

[Paul Sánchez Keighley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m calling it: Book of Numbers is going to be one of those books that future scholars will look back on as the most significant work of literature produced by its age, which in this book’s case would be the 2010’s. Reading it had my mind’s cogs working at full speed, not because it's difficult per se, but because of the ideas it entertains.

It is essentially a book about books in the digital age, and is articulated around the book-screen dichotomy. This is implicit in the title: letters (“book”) vs numbers, i. e., code, programming, internet. The amount of pointers, allusions, connections and misdirections having to do with this theme lead the reader to fall into borderline kabbalistic readings: the three sections of the book are titled 1, 0 and 1. In binary that's 5, which is the number of books of the Torah, the cornerstone of Jewish tradition (that greatest of textual and intertextual traditions) and the book alluded to in the title.

When I first read about the plot, I’ll admit it made me groan: a failed writer called Joshua Cohen is contacted to ghostwrite the memoirs of the founder of a high-tech company also called Joshua Cohen. But while reading the book, I realised this concept was thematically brilliant: the acolytes of the old world now live at the service of the new, carrying out hollow imitations or simulacra of what they see as their life’s calling - writing - for a living. In most cases, the mulsh they produce (call it “content”) depends entirely on the good graces of the denizens of the palace of numbers that hosts the vast majority of all written texts today (such as this review), which is the internet.

JC the writer stands for the old world of books and how old-school writers struggle to adapt to the technocratic rules that govern the realm of literature as it becomes yet another commodity in our hypertrophied neoliberal market (there is a palpable anger throughout the book that is exciting). The fact that the (anti)climax of the book is set in the Frankfurt Book Fair drives this point home.

JC the techie, on the other hand, represents the new world, the world of numbers and coding. Cohen (the author) described the latter in an interview as being "somewhere on the CEO spectrum", and the whole middle section, which is told in this character’s voice, reads almost like a high-brow version of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time . Cohen’s ability to perfectly capture the thought patterns of a high-functioning autistic person while simultaneously telling a story that’s moving and exciting (Moe. Oh, Moe. If you know, you know) had me floored. This section also contains some brilliant reflections (or lamentations) on the way search engines have changed the way we write. Websites contain text that is not written to be read by humans but by search engines, and so sacrifice style for shoehorning in keywords. We are retconning our language to adapt to the standards of SEO. Language is dead, long live the search engine!

There are a lot of real-world situations and references alluded to throughout, from the Vietnam War to 9/11 to Julian Assange. I love this book. I would read it again. If you consider yourself a lover of literature, you should read it. Like Joyce, it’s not easy, but it’s important.

[Liviu]

unreadable junk posing as postmodern literature

[Alex · Rating 2 out of 5]

After a strong start, each passing chapter becomes tetrationally more insufferable.

[Thijs Joores · Rating 1 out of 5]

Het eerste boek dat ik één ster geef. Gefeliciteerd, Joshua Cohen. Met deze 500+ pagina's pure ellende heb je de eer ruimschoots verdiend.

[Sue · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am feeling totally whipped by this book, stretched and poked. Reviewers on Goodreads have said they quit after 50 pages or 100 pages, and I get that. They probably went out and did great things with the hours they saved. This strange book is, however, entirely readable even if it did not readily pull me in. I sighed early on and figured I had to know where Cohen was leading. I’m glad I made the investment, but it was a wild ride.

For starters, the voice changes from time to time, and it takes a bit of a read before you cotton on to each new one. I immediately remembered Joyce’s Ulysses, not surprisingly, but Book of Numbers is more accessible.

So much for Lit 101… I digress because this book makes me digress. Not unlike the Internet, come to think of it, which is the topic of this book.

The basic plot is simple. A failed author named Joshua Cohen (like the real author) has been engaged as a biographer for an Internet mogul also named Joshua Cohen. Part one introduces author Cohen, who - we are constantly reminded -has messed up most of his life, including his marriage and career.

The middle, longest part is an odyssey with the mogul Cohen, whom he calls "Principal." Principal is a mash-up of computer icons like Steve Jobs, Sergey Brinn, and Bill Gates, with his remarkable set of skills at the right time, at the beginning of the digital age. (Principal is not, however, any one of these people exactly.) The description of the early days of search engines is for me a particularly successful segment of part two. The characters here are the most interesting of the book. Besides Principal, there’s the programming genius Moe and the immoral executive Kori Dienerowitz. Principal tells his story to Cohen, who struggles to begin writing. There’s a lot of his rejected prose portrayed graphically with crossed-out sections. The interview sessions take place all around the globe, because Principal is avoiding his own exec Dienerowitz as well as a Julian Assange double named Balk. He’s trying to get his story down before these two can intervene. He’s dying, as it turns out, and has to talk fast.

Part three returns to author Cohen, who achieves some peace with the shadows which chase him. This part is comprised of a number of emails (his wife’s new boyfriend), blog entries (the estranged wife), and first person narrative in which he recognizes a few of the illusions he’s been living with. Using these Internet prose forms seemed entirely appropriate and felt satisfying to me as a wind-down from the verbal mayhem of Part two.

What Cohen (the real author, not the character) loves to do is play with language. There are esoteric words and made-up words. He’s mired in a digital world but longing for books. I loved some of the neologisms which were created for a nuanced meaning: moremory, comptrastingly, starchitect, confirmative. Whether or not you enjoy this book will rely in part on your interest in word play. There are sections which are really too long. Was the long slog about the publishing trade really necessary? Some of his many digressions could have used a more stringent editing.

And while Joyce follows a framework from Homer’s Ulysses, Joshua Cohen roughly follows the Biblical Book of Numbers. I wish I knew more about the Biblical connection, but here’s an instructive paragraph from Wikipedia.

Numbers is the culmination of the story of Israel’s exodus from oppression in Egypt and their journey to take possession of the land God promised their fathers.… God has promised the Israelites that they shall become a great (i.e. numerous) nation, that they will have a special relationship with Yahweh their god, and that they shall take possession of the land of Canaan.

God is testing the endurance of the Israelites. It’s just a parallel to keep in mind, but I’m mentally exhausted for the time being.

[lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ok, I hate to do this, but I'm calling it. I simply can't finish this book. I received a copy on Netgalley almost a month ago, and I dove right it. The writing is different from most contemporary fiction today, with wordy sentences, full of humor and depth. The plot was a great premise for this day and age, and if I weren't someone who has so much to read, if I were the type of person who only read two books a year, this one would be a wonderful choice. The sentences are some to savor and the ideas are some to discuss. However, this book is insanely long, and the characters don't interest me enough to care about what happens to them. I'm somewhat interested to see what happens at the end, but after weeks of forcing myself to read a few pages a night, I just can't do it anymore. I hope this book finds its audience, which I can see as being young, smart hipsters who like the idea of reading, but I don't think I am it.

[Anni]

I was sold on the knockout first line of this novel - one of the best openers since Du Mauriers ‘Rebecca’.
Described as ‘brilliantly exhausting’ by Mark Sarvas and adorned with a blurb by James Wood, of the New York Times - “Reads as if Philip Roth’s work were fired into David Foster Wallace’s inside the Hadron particle collider” – Book of Numbers went straight to the top of my TBR pile.
However, faced with a massive hardback doorstopper of 600 pages, my enthusiasm has waned somewhat, so I am putting it on the back burner (probably a bad choice of metaphor for a book) till I can summon up enough strength to give it the attention it undoubtably deserves.
Meanwhile, if you can't stand the suspense of waiting for my appraisal, I can fully recommend those by fellow GR reviewers LS Popovich and MJ Nichols.

[Markus · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Literaten trauen der Wahrheit nicht, Sachbuchautoren schwören auf sie, Ghostwriter aber - das sind meist arbeitslose Journalisten mit Romanen in der Schublade - liegen genau dazwischen. Und selbst diese Trennlinie ist nicht eindeutig. Womit ich sagen will: Meine Beziehung zu meinen Gespenstern sind immer gefälscht worden. Am Ende schreibe ich immer alle um und werde so selbst umgeschrieben. Wenn du im Leben von Kontrollfreaks, Egomanen, Berufsnarzisten und Solipsisten herumspukst, dem deiner Liebhaberinnen, deiner Frau, deiner Mutter, dann verwandelst du dich auch in sie, unweigerlich."

Ist das jetzt der ultimative Internetroman, den Kritiker verheißungsvoll als Ulysses der Online-Generation feiern, der große Zeitenwenderoman, der den postmodernen Geist unserer (post-)postmodernen Zeit endlich in adäquater, will heissen (post-(post-))postmoderner Form und Sprache zwischen die Kartondeckel zwängt? Das gemeine Publikum scheint die Meinung der Fachpresse jedenfalls gar nicht zu teilen.

Der (erfolgreiche) Autor mit Gastprofessur in Berlin Joshua Cohen schreibt als (erfolgloser) Autor Joshua Cohen, der Loser, der einen Job angeboten bekommt. Als Ghostwriter soll er die Autobiographie von Joshua Cohen, dem grossen Vorsitzenden von Tetration.com schreiben und für sehr viel Geld seine Seele verkaufen. Tetration ist der alles beherrschende IT-Konzern und sieht wie eine milliardenschwere Kombination aus Google, Apple und Facebook aus [albtraum!]. Der große Vorsitzende ist - äh - ich versuche es zurückhaltend mit der Ferndiagnose narzisstische Persönlichkeitsstörung, und er hat eine verblüffende Ähnlichkeit mit dem verblichenen Vorsitzenden His Steveness.

Neben dem ganzen Techkram gibts noch Beziehungskiste, Sexgeschichten, jüdisches Kulturkolorit, armer Autor im Großstadtdschungel, Frankfurter Buchmessenwahnsinn und eine Erpressung durch eine Kopie von Julian Assange und dessen russischem Assistenten. All das wird überzeichnet und satirisch inszeniert und bringt die schrille Hysterie egomanischer Communities treffsicher zur Geltung.

Die Figuren werden bei den meisten Lesern keine Sympathien hervorrufen. Egal wie man es damit hält, [ich mag unsympathische Protagonisten], die Figur des großen Vorsitzenden ist im Grunde tragisch. Seine Lebensgeschichte und die Entstehungsgeschichte des Konzerns, die er im langen Mittelteil dem Mikrofon seines Ghostwriters preisgibt, ist ermüdend. Der urban-trendige, bemüht hippe Szenesprech fast aller Beteiligten schafft ein nervendes, aber authentisches Ambiente. Auch Cohen (der Loser) neigt als Ich-Erzähler zu einer akzentuiert legeren Sprache (er steht nicht herum, er hängt ab), man sollte ihn keinesfalls mit Cohen (dem Autor) verwechseln und tut es doch.

"Übergang vom Buch zum online Sein 2.0 in beta Version" - sagt Cohen. Cool!
Überhaupt neigt er [Cohen oder Cohen?] zu coolen [ist cool überhaupt noch cool?] Sprüchen. Fast möchte ich eine Ausnahme machen und das mir selbst in Rezensionen verbotene Wort Feuerwerk benützen. Ein [F-Wort einsetzen] aus hippen Sprüchen, ultrakrassen Formulierungen, abgefahrenem Techslang, nerdigem Geekspeech, kreativen Redundanzen, redundanten Kreationen, Stabreimen, durchgestrichenen Sätzen, Blasen, Schaum, Sprudel und autoreflexiven Notizen in eckigen Klammern - teils Reminiszenz an den Slang der Coder, Nerds und Wannabes, teils postmoderne Bemühtheit 3.0. Überhaupt wirkt die Dichte postmoderner Taschenspielerei auf Dauer inflationär.

Das in Titel und Motto referenzierte Buch der Zahlen, das biblische Buch Numeri (4. Buch Moses, tetra(!)) sieht der Autor als Übergang, er sieht hier einen Bruch in der Bibel, die Konstituierung des Volkes der Juden, die Volkszählung. Heute ist es der Übergang vom analogen ins digitale Zeitalter. [stellt die technologie des internets die literatur/die kunst in frage?]

metaphoric transposition - nein kein neuer Achselspray - mehr so akademisch-literaturwissenschaftlich, jedenfalls hat sich der Autor was gedacht [hoffentlich nicht zuviel. "Die metaphorische Transposition bildet das Modell, wie die Phasen innerhalb des Mimesiskreises miteinander verbunden sind, und bezeichnet zugleich auch die Mimesisspirale selbst. So wie das 'Sehen als' der Metapher durch die Spannung - dem Zusammenprall in der Form einer impertinenten Prädikation zum Beispiel - eine Ähnlichkeit erzeugt und nicht nur eine neue Welt, sondern eine neue Welt erschafft." (Natalie Moser - Die Erzählung als Bild der Zeit, … S.82)]

Suchmaschinen. Kann sich noch jemand an Altavista erinnern? Oder Lycos, Excite, Inktomi, Metacrawler? Die Bibel? Lukas 11,9 oder Mathäus 7,7: Suchet, so werdet ihr finden. Und WTF ist eigentlich ein "elektrophoretisches bruchsicheres Tablet vom Berg Sinai"? [btw, elektrophoretisch ist in diesem zusammenhang eigentlich totaler nonsens...]

"Recht eigentlich." [übrigens, die übersetzung ins deutsche von [name nachschauen!] ist beachtsam.]

Cohen hat viel recherchiert und sich bildlich gesprochen! den Arsch aufgerissen, um den digitalen Wandel und die damit einhergehende Kulturimplosion in eine adäquate literarische Form zu gießen. Vielleicht war er etwas zu ambitioniert. Coupland und Eggers schauen trotzdem blass aus. Thomas Pynchon mit Bleeding Edge ist weniger verspielt, visionärer und bleibt in dem Genre unübertroffen. Was nervende Figuren angeht, das konnte William Gaddis noch eine Spur besser.

Jetzt muss ich dringend betonen, dass es viele richtig gute Passagen gibt. Köstlich z.B. im zweiten Teil der Aufenthalt des großen Vorsitzenden in einem japanischen Zenkloster. Am Ende stellt sich heraus, dass die Mönche, als die Regierung in der Nähe ein AKW errichtete, das Kloster aufgegeben haben, worauf es eine amerikanische Firma aufkaufte und als Touristen-Kloster betrieb. Vor allem der großartige dritte und letzte Teil hat mich nach einem Durchhänger im zweiten Teil versöhnt, die peinlichen Blogs von Cohens Ex, aufdringliche Mails vom neuen Lover der Ex und Abhandlungen über anthropomorphe Artefakte aus der Steinzeit wechseln mit den Erzählungen Cohens ab, wie er durch Berlin, Frankfurt und Wien irrt, all seiner digitalen Identitäten beraubt, zwangsweise offline und wie doch noch alles ein Happy End nimmt.

"Wieder zu den Banken, dann entweder Bibliothek oder Cafe. Wenn dies Literatur wäre, kämen meine alltäglichen Besorgungen hier nicht vor, aber das ist die Wahrheit, da müsst ihr durch."

Wahrheit und Fake sind ja nicht wie ein Bit, 1 oder 0, true || false, sondern unscharf wie ein Quantenbit, mit zig Zuständen zwischen 0 und 1. Und war das nicht immer so? - auch wenn es scheint, dass das Bit seit den Internetzen und dann auch noch Trump besonders unscharf geworden ist.

"Die Fernbedienung ist meist das schmutzigste Ding im Raum, dem Großen Vorsitzenden zufolge. Eine Milliarde Bakterien pro Knopf, im Durchschnitt. Die DNS eines jeden Bakteriums enthält dabei den Gegenwert von ungefähr einer Million Bytes an Information. Sodass ein Fernbedienungsknopf durchschnittlich über eine Speicherkapazität von ca. 100000 Terabyte verfügt."

[quatsch!? kann nicht sein: 1 Mrd. * 1 Mio. sind nur ≈ 1000 Terabyte. ich sollte nicht immer so kleinlich sein, wegen 2 Nullen, und wenn, sind es die Bakterien, nicht der Knopf, und verfügen tun sie auch nicht …̧$̵̶̗ͨͅͅ@͑̽&̾ͯ%... und 1 MB pro bakterie, ob wenigstens das stimmt? 1 basenpaar = 2 bits => 4 basenpaare = 1 byte, dürfte sehr unterschiedlich sein, bakterien mit 4 mio. basenpaaren, kann schon sein - recherchieren! das genom des homo sapiens (3*10hoch9) ist jedenfalls nur 1 null größer wie das des gemüsekohls, aber das hat hier wirklich nichts verloren]

Absicht oder Irrtum? Über Informationstechnologie, aber auch über Buddhismus und Hinduismus wird viel Unsinn verzapft. Man weiss nie, wie man dran ist: Schlecht recherchiert oder Absicht? Falls Absicht, bringt das was, wenn es nur im Fachgebiet bewanderte User Leser bemerken?

Alles ist interpretationselastisch: Das im Titel referenzierte Buch der Zahlen, das biblische Buch Numeri (4. Buch Moses) sieht der Autor als Übergang, er sieht hier einen Bruch in der Bibel, die Konstituierung des Volkes der Juden, die Volkszählung. Und/aber: Die Anhänger eines launischen Gottes ließen sich 40 Jahre durch die Wüste schicken, bevor sie das heilige Land betreten durften. Auch Anhänger moderner Götter nehmen einiges auf sich, "[...] wie Techies, die vor ausgewählten Einzelhandelsgeschäften kampieren, um zu viel Geld für einen zu wenig getesteten Tetheld 4 zahlen zu dürfen." [same as it ever was?]

Beliebigkeit, so oder so, egal, morgen ist alles neu. Das Internet kann man nicht erzählen, es ist fluid. Deshalb ist der Roman über weite Strecken so als ob, und wird deshalb im selben Moment zeitgemäß authentisch. Nur - das gedruckte Buch ist statisch. Wie ein Screenshot. Oder besser ein Snapshot der Volumes eines Backup Servers. Die stillstehende Komponente des rasenden Stillstands. Morgen steht [hoffentlich!] noch das selbe da - nur überholt.

Auch ein Thema des Romans, die Mühsal des mühsam erarbeiteten, korrigierten, redigierten, lektorierten, gedruckten, papierenen Buchs im Zeitalter von Wisch und Weg und unüberlegten Posts. Die zahlreichen durchgestrichenen Passagen illustrieren den altmodischen Schaffensprozess des Reflektierens, Verwerfens, Neuschreibens, das ist doch sehr gelungen.

Meine subjektive Beurteilung ist unscharf, ambivalent, widersprüchlich: interessant, manchmal witzig, manchmal fad, ohne Zweifel durchdacht und gescheit, intellektuell, vielleicht zu viel metaphorische Transpiration und zu wenig Nähe. Von den drei sehr unterschiedlichen Teilen war der erste ok, der zweite langweilig [oder war ich nur schlecht drauf, wer weiss das schon?], der dritte Teil hat mir sehr gut gefallen. Das sind auf der linearidiotischen Beurteilungsskala nichtssagende 3⅓, nichtssagend ist das Buch sicher nicht. Robin Detje, der geniale Übersetzer verdient ein dickes Extralob, das macht ★★★★.

"Bei allem was ich geschrieben habe, vielmehr: bei allen Computern, die ich besessen habe - dem letzen Laptop, den Compaqs und Dells, die Ava von der Arbeit mitgebracht hatte, dem Gopal auf dem Schreibtisch draußen in Ridgewood - hatte ich diese Angstvorstellung. Ich öffne eines Tages das .doc mit dem Projekt, an dem ich gerade arbeite, alles ist ganz normal, vielleicht regnet es, und finde alles umgeschrieben. Irgendjemand, obwohl meine Angst mir nie ein klares Bild dieses jemands gezeigt hat, ist in meinen Computer gelangt, und ich kann nicht mehr sagen, was von mir und was von ihm ist. Aber erst bei diesem Buch, dem des großen Vorsitzenden - aber auch mit diesem - wird mir endlich klar, dass das durchaus vorstellbar wäre.
Also wenn hier was Schlechtes steht, ist es nicht von mir."

[kate · Rating 2 out of 5]

Previous reviews seem to confirm that Joshua Cohen's Book of Numbers is becoming the Book No One Can Finish of 2015.

What to do about this? Spend more time reading the rest (I'm about 1/4 of the way through this 600-pager), because I hate leaving a book unfinished -- or, for that matter, reviewing a book I haven't finished? Or spend my time reading something more worthwhile, getting other work done? God knows time is not a thing I have a surplus of. So I'm torn. I might trudge on for a while and update this review if the novel warrants it, but at the very least, I'm not making my progress through this one a priority. (Though I'd welcome any comments from those who have read further, especially if there are ways that Cohen redeems himself as the novel wears on.)

So: should I review a book I haven't finished yet? Well, I've at least disclosed that fact. And on some level, being fairly put off by the first 120+ pages of a book is a legitimate response to that book, and one that might be useful. I suppose it's up to prospective readers to decide if they're willing to wait longer than that for a novel to start returning on the investment they've put into it.

Take that for what it's worth. Not that it isn't fun to watch the angry 5-star reviewers throw (condescending) punches at the other reviewers. But, in that regard: no, I didn't quit this book because I don't have the "patience" for it. No, I didn't stop reading because I was too "offended." And no, I didn't stop reading because I didn't "get" it. I just didn't like it.

My complaints aren't just that the parts of the book I've read so far can be a bit offensive; I don't really get offended in visceral enough ways to make me stop reading something midway through. Yeah, sure, Cohen's tendency to write women as caricatures is off-putting. But while labels like racist and sexist are valuable in many contexts, I do think they get thrown around a bit too flatly in literary discussions -- novels are (or can be) nuanced in ways that play with those kinds of caricature so as to indict racism and sexism in subtle ways, and we can't equate narrator/character with author. And it's clear Cohen is going for irony. But what really made me stop reading is that it's a tired kind of irony. This novel is trying really hard, and reading it is like having to watch it try and feeling a little bad for it when it fails. Even the language bears that out -- a lot of weird, overdone alliteration and prose-rhyme (both of which I tend to find annoying in any context, not just in this book). And it's also playing into contemporary trends -- the tome-like novel, the overwriting, the unreliable / annoying / generally odious writer-narrator, the fragments / fragmentary text from multiple "sources." To be fair, it's easy to criticize something because it's "been done," but I also think that there is a difference between working within a trend or genre and playing into it badly.

The basic premise of the novel (that Joshua Cohen [author] writes about Joshua Cohen [first-person narrator] who is ghostwriting the autobiography/memoir of Joshua Cohen [character]) has the potential to be either pretentious and gimmicky or a clever starting point for reflections on authorship, identity, life-writing, "real" life, and the slippages between all of those things. The ideas Cohen (as author) starts to play with about the boundaries between identities and the power of naming -- under all the overwritten text, those do start to get interesting.

Overall, though: right from that early comment where Cohen-as-narrator says that "working on a book had been like being pregnant," I just couldn't take this book (or Cohen/Cohen) that seriously, and I probably have the great Patricia Lockwood to blame for that. It's a lot funnier coming from her, anyway.

[This is a review of an advance copy received for free through Goodreads First Reads.]

[Gerhard · Rating 2 out of 5]

I. Finished. This. Fucker.

Difficult to believe I have been struggling with this monster since July. While there is no doubt as to the brilliance of Cohen, namely his verbal gymnastics, combined with his seemingly inexhaustible general knowledge, this takes a heavy toll on the casual reader.

Maybe therein lies the rub: is this book only meant for acolytes and/or literati? I feel that, as a postmodern experiment, it threatens to alienate the reader to the extent that he/she feels removed from the equation entirely. (Does that even make sense?) Somehow I felt that Cohen was just writing for the sake of writing, and fuck hoary genre tropes and narrative conventions.

Still, this makes for compulsive reading, particularly the first few hundred pages. I tended to go cross-eyed during the long sections written as stream-of-consciousness emails ... and what is it with the long crossed-out pieces? Why not just redact them ... especially since I found myself reading these, curious as to why Cohen excised them in the first place.

I think any reader has a love/hate relationship with an author/text. This is definitely one of the sadomasochistic kind.

[Lobstergirl · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book started out so promisingly. It has three sections: the first is 154 pages, the second 254 pages, and the third 159 pages. The first section was funny and charming and hooked me right away. In it, the protagonist, an author named (like the author) Joshua Cohen, has a novel come out on 9/10/01, which is immediately buried by the events of 9/11. (Interestingly, this was Jonathan Franzen's complaint about The Corrections). Joshua enters a humiliating yearslong period in which he's forced to take on lesser writing projects, such as ghostwriting children's books, catalog copy, and fake hotel reviews, to pay the bills, while watching the career of a semi-friend publishing material on the invasions of Afganistan and Iraq soar.

In the second section, Joshua Cohen interviews the subject of a biography he's been hired to write of a tech mogul also named Joshua Cohen, who created the Google-like company Tetration. This section immediately became bogged down in the boring details of Tetration's history and workforce. It does have a few excellent sentences, but mostly is just unrelieved tedium. The last section was an improvement on the middle section, but didn't rise to the heights of the first.

I was perturbed by Cohen's ignorance of the simple past tense in five instances. The simple past of sink is sank, not sunk. It's stank, not stunk. It's sprang, not sprung. And "So what was he trying to wrangle out of you?" - the word he wants is wangle.

[Marc Kozak · Rating 3 out of 5]

For this weighty and modern book about the Internet and search engines, it seemed appropriate to click around on random links and just include chunks of text from various places to serve as a review.

"The problem with internet quotes is that you cant always depend on their accuracy." -Abraham Lincoln, 1864. (A popular internet meme re: validity of accurate info on internet. Original source unknown, unknowable? http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/fake-quotations)

"Book of Numbers is a 2015 novel written by author Joshua Cohen.It was published by Random House, and released in 2015. It received mostly positive reviews. Critics compared Cohen's writing favorably to that of Philip Roth and David Foster Wallace." (From Wikipedia, Book of Numbers (novel))

"Book Of Numbers is the story of Joshua Cohen, a struggling novelist whose first book failed because it was released on September 11, 2001—or at least that’s the excuse he makes. While going through a messy divorce and failing to fend off a pornography addiction, Joshua is hired by a billionaire, also named Joshua Cohen (but referred to as the Principal, thankfully), to ghostwrite his memoirs. The Principal is a tech genius who founded the company Tetration that, for all intents and purposes, is a more advanced version of Google. Characters spend the novel “tetrating” everything they can, using the company name as a verb." (From The Guardian, review by Poole, Steven, Jun 15, 2015)

"In mathematics, tetration (or hyper-4) is the next hyperoperator after exponentiation, and is defined as iterated exponentiation. The word was coined by Reuben Louis Goodstein, from tetra- (four) and iteration. Tetration is used for the notation of very large numbers." (Top result from Google search, terms "tetration definition"; definition itself from Wikipedia, "Tetration".)

"I'm not sure how many problems I have because math is one of them." (Saying from popular "ecard", in which a humorous saying is paired with a somewhat-related, old-fashioned drawing. Source: Someecards.com. See also: Hallmark, parody.)

"As with the Internet, it’s hard to say what the novel’s “about,” or what its purpose is, or even if it has a moral center. A hyperlinked sense of distraction and refraction is built into the text, in Cohen’s readiness to spin off on tangents from Neolithic goddess figures (there are pictures!) to the semiotic covalences of “buttons” and “knots.” The novel, which incorporates interview transcripts, emails, an incomplete draft of Principal’s autobiography (with crossings-out intact), Joshua’s memoir-in-progress, and the ranting therapy blog of his almost-ex-wife, reflects something of what must have been the circumstances of its own composition, that continual immersion in anything, in everything, one ever wanted to know and a lot that one didn’t that we can hardly now avoid." (From Slate, review by Hendrix, Jenny, Jul 6, 2015)

"Hmm, it's just as I suspected. People are using the internet at a very high rate on a daily basis. Fascinating." (From review posted to Goodreads.com, originally written by Kozak, Marc, Jul 25, 2015.)

"It’s always the trouble with literary imitation: without a specific parodic target, a consistent performance of bad style is still just bad style, and a dedicated simulation of boredom is still boring. Pages upon pages of a marketing person’s blog, or the mistyped emails of a narcissistic actor, or the office-politics reminiscences of a tech billionaire – such efforts certainly convince the reader that the author has carefully catalogued the linguistic infelicities common to such forms and human stereotypes. But they’re still a slog to read." From The Guardian, review by Poole, Steven, Jun 15, 2015)

"My bias is to like ambitious books more than I probably should, out of admiration for the writer aiming high, even if unsuccessfully (see: Norman Mailer)." (From review posted to Goodreads.com, originally written by user "Don", Jul 9, 2015.)

But...




(LOLCat meme, originally from http://icanhas.cheezburger.com/. See also: image macro.)

[LauraT · Rating 2 out of 5]

I know that this has been highlighted as one of the most beautiful new releases of the last times.
Still, reading it, struggling along with it I’d rather say, I was reminded of an anecdote a friend of mine told me some years ago. She was with her husband listening in Liguria to a concert with music by Luciano Berio in a little square of a little town of the coast of this beautiful Italian Region. Two persons sitting in the line in front of her, during the interval, said to each other “We didn’t study”, meaning that they didn’t have the intellectual tools to understand and appreciate this music.
I have studied – years and years ago I admit – and also Foreigner Language and Literature, with a particular focus on Anglo-American Literature. But still I can’t really understand and appreciate it. And moreover, going back to those two elderly persons in Liguria, I always think that Giotto, Caravaggio, Michelangelo, Bach, Mozart, Dante, Shakespeare, Dickens, wrote and worked for those who had not studied. And they were loved, appreciated and understood. Of course, if you have studied you see more than others behind a fresco, concert, novel, poem. Still a great artist, in my humble opinion, has to talk to everybody, not only to elites. But as usual I’m the old communist you know me for!!!!

To show you what I mean:
“The Gulfstream 650 is the largest elite jet in the Gulfstream fleet. Its maximum operating speed of .925 Mach makes it the fastest civil aircraft flying, and its maximum altitude of 50,000 ft allows it to avoid congestion and adverse weather,” but then I gave up reading All About the Tetjet, and switched, dismissive flick of screen, to Media, streaming everything conceivable but also featuring a selection “curated this quarter by Kori Dienerowitz, President”: 80s sitcoms, Jeopardy!, Scorsese, Westerns all’italiana, Korean Wave, Mecha anime, 20 episodes of a show called Xun Qin Ji.” Or “In international unicode standard, by which every conceivable character in the universe can be represented by an octet, or a sequence of eight bits, Principal’s net worth would be signified by 00110001 00111000 00110010 00110000 00110000 00110000 00110000 00110000 00110000 00110000 00110000 (or $18.2B, as of 2010 taxes), and the value of my advance for this book by 00110100 00110100 00110000 00110000 00110000 00110000 (or $440K)—though I’ll get only half that up front, or Aar will and then he’ll take his commission (00110011 00110011 00110000 00110000 00110000), and then the IRS will take its too (00110001 00110101 00110100 00110000 00110000 00110000).” Or “Joseph Cohen [might’ve been a greenhorn but he had a green thumb, a man] who grew apples from asphalt, berries from tar. An inveterate tinkerer who [FILL ALL THIS IN].Cohen, who founded his career on memory, on the notion that memory is the future’s greatest commodity, The time Cohen spent with his grandfather in the last summer of his grandfather’s life comprises Cohen’s only memory of Summer 1977, Joseph was ailing, and Abs took a leave of absence from PARC, and took his only son, then six years old, to New York.

Why should I appreciate something like this? I do understand that everything has already been written, still…

[Leo Robertson · Rating 2 out of 5]

If a reader quits a book 250 pages in (I am not the first, by the looks of other reviews), it's not the reader's fault. When you exchange money for a piece of text, "hoping it will be intelligible" is, like, a given, about four or five layers down beneath many more expectations, all of which get dashed if a reader is compelled to quit reading.

There's a difference between a literary brain workout-type challenge and just a "trying to overlook unnecessary flaws in the basic function of the text"-type challenge. If the latter were something that intelligent readers sought out, they'd all be thrilled with Fifty Shades of Grey. (Or whatever. Do you get my point? I just Cohened my way through an analogy ahaha. "I'm so smart I can't even be bothered formulating basic quips.")

Now... I'm all for experimentation, but if that experimentation disrupts the very basic duties of a writer—putting the reader in the scene, helping them build settings and characters in their head, letting them know who is talking at all times—I mean, THOSE things aren't the things that are passé and worthy of shaking up, jerkwad!

And the bad thing is that Mr Cohen's book is shot through with wonderful passages. It's just that all the bullshit and pointless obfuscation gets in the way to such a degree that it stops becoming worth it.
Which is a shame in that regard! If only it were all bad!

It isn't with complete relief that I put this one aside.

You know, I've read enough of these self-conscious overeducated Jewishness novels to know when they're not worth it, and I put off buying this one for a long time because I knew from the description—character "Joshua Cohen's" novel published on 9/11, meets "Joshua Cohen" the billionaire—that I wouldn't learn why he'd bothered to insert himself in the text, or what point he was making about the fictionalised him or the billionaire guy or why he thought to bring them together. I knew going in that the idea of having a point to the way his novel was set up would be a yawn-inspiring task beneath this supergenius and that I'd just have a strange kind of trashy fun with this novel (this kinda nonsense is my equivalent of Sex and the City, see) even though it's supposed to be highbrow and all that.

Look, this site is great, but if I were a lit-bag looking to condescend on an epic and anonymous scale, I'd hang out on this site and scold people I didn't know for not finishing their brusseliterary sprouts. And to you guys I say, I've been using this site a long time and my rule of thumb is this: if a friend of mine comments, I'll look at it. If a stranger likes a review and comments, I'll see what they have to say. If a stranger comments but doesn't like, I know what that comment is. And I won't read THIS and I won't read THAT!

Don't you have better stuff to do than engage facile lil' me in a scoldfest? Surely Dalkey Archive Press have some new translation from the original German of some obscure depressing modernist dude?

Go eat that up, doofus!

[Josh Friedlander · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cohen loves language but apparently hates people. His style is perseveration, obsessive playing with sounds and puns, decoupling words from their meanings, abbreviating, listing, switching languages (he loves his French and German). Cohen can't avoid a pun or use a reversable phrase without reversing it. As every reviewer seemingly must, I quote here a sentence drawn more or less at random so you'll believe me:

"We just hung around the condo and avoided the computers, mutant x86ish PCs D-Unit had clunked himself, monitors surrounded by boxes of Kleenex and spritzers of Windex, keyboards surrounded by pressurized air containers, for blowing out the dust from between the keys, and the other periphs he clunked himself too as like joysticks and steeringwheels and the double mice he called rats surmounted with babywipes and kleengel antiseptics."

Note the verbal tics: "D-unit" (one parent, partner of M-unit), "as like", the itemised descriptions.

Which is cool: but here's the thing. Cohen is not interested in plot - which is fine - but this novel has a plot. Plotless would be a vast improvement - but this is a boilerplate tech-corporate story, with a Google-standin and Wikileaks-standin so lazily disguised you wonder why he bothered. And some flimsy, insulting female archetypes - the harping ex-, the fantasy young Francophone married Omani mistress...

Lots of fascinating details about tech/early Google history, which Cohen has inhaled and expelled unchanged (and very lightly explained) onto the page. YMMV on this one; I quite enjoyed it.

It's just a pity Cohen is relentlessly cynical, too cool to care about anything; that's just so fatiguing. He knows everything and thinks it all boring. There is no point to this novel, no lesson. And if these hundreds of pages of linguistic solpsisim have nothing to say about actual humans, one wonders if a novel is really the right form for them.

PS This review sums up my feelings about the novel fairly well.

[GeneralTHC]

The first thing to realize is that this is not an average novel. If you're looking for a breezy read, this is not it. While I've seen comparisons to David Foster Wallace and Thomas Pynchon, I'm not finding it anywhere near that difficult, but I can see why someone might make that comparison: it's just absolutely packed with quick-witted asides, and it would be easy to either get frustrated trying to follow it, or think you're following it when you're actually missing a great deal. So you need to really be on top of it when you read this. I'm sure many readers will just get frustrated, abandon the book, and give a low rating to it. That's what I suspect we're seeing with most of these early reviews. No, odds are you're not going to just be able rip through this book like an average best-seller. Take it slow, read and re-read to you get the flow. That's why I'm doing. I read the first 80 or so pages 3 times, and now I'm really getting into it.

[Ben Bush]

I interviewed Cohen for Los Angeles Review of Books http://bit.ly/1eABwbO

The part of the interview where I talked to Cohen about his work translating porn CD-ROM product copy while living in Eastern Europe is up at The Rumpus http://bit.ly/1dD6C1H

Here's a listicle for Flavorwire. Book of Numbers explained, if not through animated GIFs, at least adjacent to them, which was sort of a byproduct of the interviews. http://bitly.com/1HvqIaR