Same Same

by Peter Mendelsund

In the shifting sands of the desert, near an unnamed metropolis, there is an institute where various fellows come to undertake projects of great significance. But when our sort-of hero, Percy Frobisher, arrives, surrounded by the simulated environment of the glass-enclosed dome of the Institute, his mind goes completely blank. When he spills something on his uniform—a major faux pas—he learns about a mysterious shop where you can take something, utter the command “same same,” and receive a replica even better than the original. Imagining a world in which simulacra have as much value as the real—so much so that any distinction between the two vanishes, and even language seeks to reproduce meaning through ever more degraded copies of itself—Peter Mendelsund has crafted a deeply unsettling novel about what it means to exist and to create . . . and a future that may not be far off.

Genres: Fiction, Science Fiction, Literary Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Literature, Middle East, Adult

496 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2019

About the author

Peter Mendelsund is the associate art director of Alfred A. Knopf and a recovering classical pianist. His designs have been described by The Wall Street Journal as being “the most instantly recognizable and iconic book covers in contemporary fiction.” He lives in New York.

Reviews

[BlackOxford · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Trap of Creative Ambition

The command to know oneself is one of those shibboleths of ancient philosophy that are taken as universally sound advice. But the obsessive drive to know oneself is a trap. Knowing oneself can become an ambition like any other: it absorbs the life that’s meant to be improved into itself and creates a prisoner who is at the mercy of the ambition. Even if the ambition in question is purely intellectual, the trap is set.

In fact all ambitions end up in the same sump of attempting to know oneself. The thematic core of the novel captures the common thread: “Become the best you.” This is the pervasive ethos of Freehold, the desert country and its Institute populated by creative geniuses in various fields from Brand Management and Financial Derivatives to Astrology and Architecture. Whatever their intellectual speciality, all end up pursuing some vision of themselves, that “ineffable, secret self.” The Institute is the ultimate self-help programme in an Apple-like campus.

The Institute runs on words, lots of words, and therefore lots of paper. It also provides “deliberation arenas, thought-huddles, and social pods” for the exchange of words among the residents. The Director of the Institute is very concerned to generate “ideas that are transmissible, scalable, and viable.” He wants “The PERFECT project and Discourse™. Relatable, marketable, profound, digestible, fun, fresh, smart…a masterful theorization of the Now.” This demands hard work from all the residents and “requires your complete buy-in. FULL bandwidth... End-to-end; ERROR-FREE channels. Proactivity. Actualization.” Words, of course, seem to have their own ideas and eventually gum up the works, literally and figuratively. Words can make you crazy; or mask the craziness already there. Wordspace is not meatspace, even if they do leak into one another.

The sci-fi (or fantasy, the genre is tough to pin down) gimmick Mendelsund employs to motivate the action is a Neal Stephenson-like reproductive facility, the Same Same Shop. The Same Same Shop can not only replicate anything from clothing to currency, it can repair and restore things as well. The technology of the Same Same Shop, whatever it is, seems to know the essence of the things brought to it for help. It, uncannily, understands their reality and is able to reconstruct this reality as needed. It even knows about the reality of words as unreal and self-referential. A sort of high-tech, post-modernist Kabbalah.

And if the Same Same Shop can fix things, why shouldn’t it fix people? Particularly people with burnt out minds who are bored with life, addicted to various substances, and unable to any longer function irl (‘in real life;’ it’s essential to understand Mendelsund’s blogspeak). Perhaps it might even fix the abuse of language that is rampant within the Institute, and that reflects the general banality of the culture which produced it. If only...

The real question is: Can the Same Same Shop do anything at all to help the creative luvvies at the BBC find themselves and come up with better programming on Saturday nights?

[Aerin · Rating 2 out of 5]

In their book How Not to Write a Novel, Howard Mittelmark and Sandra Newman argue that first-time novelists should almost never attempt writing self-referential, post-modern books because, as they put it, "the conventions of postmodernism poorly handled are the quickest route up one's own ass."

The illustration they provide reads, well, not unlike Same Same:

Newton Showalter sat at his desk facing a blank page. (1)

What has brought me, Newton thought, to spend all my time creating fictional worlds that only I will ever enter, having the habit, as I do, of deleting anything I might have written at the end of the day? (3)

(1) While the name of the author of this novel and the character he writes about would appear to be the same, they are pronounced differently, and they did not even get along the one time they met. (2)

(2) Gainsville, Florida, March 18, 1984.

(3) How then could you be reading this, reader? Could it be that the narrator of this tale is not accurately reporting the thoughts of Newton Showalter? Or could it be that you yourself are Newton Showalter?

And so on. I'll give Peter Mendelsund credit, Same Same is not NEARLY as bad as this. The prose is often gorgeous, the worldbuilding bizarre and hypnotizing. The main character has his own name and everything.

But it's still pretty up its own ass.

-----------

The plot, as we understand it at first, goes like this: Our narrator, Percy Frobisher, arrives at a biodome facility known only as The Institute, in a small Middle-Eastern country called The Freehold. The Institute, funded by a local oligarch who "wishes to furnish the desert with creatives," is something like a college campus, something like a writers' retreat. All of the fellows are working on a project, and each is referred to by their occupation. The Architect, the Miniaturist, the Astronomer, the Composer. Percy's title is not mentioned for most of the book, and he is oddly cagey about the nature of his project - but since this is metafiction, you can probably guess what it is. Everyone's goal is to eventually present a Discourse™ (read: a TED Talk), which is the Institute's primary export. But though everyone is trying to create something novel, groundbreaking, and disruptive, their work turns out to be uniformly imitative. The Archaeologist is recreating an ancient statue destroyed in sectarian violence; the Translator is struggling to duplicate the nuances of her source material; the Actor subsumes himself so fully in his roles that they all take on warped versions of his own characteristics, and vice versa. Presciently, the first fellow Percy meets introduces himself as a financial analyst working on "Derivatives. Derivatives of derivatives, actually." Touché.

Initially, Percy intends to stay only a few weeks, convinced he'll finish his project right away. But he's warned that "the Institute has a way of encouraging one to... linger."

-----------

If all of this sounds surreal and vaguely creepy, it is, but after awhile the story's dreamlike qualities - the haziness, the gaps in the narrative, the illogicality of it all - just started to irritate me. It wasn't going anywhere.

And that's where The Magic Mountain comes in. Same Same is explicitly based on - or maybe inspired by? - Thomas Mann's 1924 doorstopper of a metaphor about Europe on the eve of World War I. This book steals chapter titles from it; Percy is reading it; the narrative echoes the plot of it in certain ways. It's derivative, see! It's same same! And every time Percy describes his frustrations with Magic Mountain, they are clearly meant to describe this book:

"Well there isn't really a story, not in the normal way... And it isn't really, like, 'a novel,' not in the traditional sense. It is kind of a grab bag. There is little in the way of development. No dramatic turns of event. And the narrator may be unreliable."

These kinds of comments pop up all the time. Mendelsund is really keen on the metafictional self-burn. But just beause he's acknowledging how annoying his book is, does that innoculate him from that particular criticism? I mean, anyone can write some piece of crap and then call it a piece of crap.

Of course, Mendelsund acknowledges this too:

"The project - and what makes up the project - may, in fact turn out to be a contrivance. Okay. But claiming something is a contrivance doesn't absolve one of the responsibility of having to construct a fucking decent, readable one."

Well, ya got me. I'd look awfully silly calling this book bad and unreadable now, wouldn't I?

"Here are [The Magic Mountain's] pages, sacrificed on the altar of my project. Cut in. As if my own novel were nothing but a prismatic version of this other book - as if that great work had been thrown in a wood chipper, its chapters, sections, sentences, words even: mixed willy-nilly..."

Yes, yes, we get it.

-----------

And then there's this other thread, having to do with the Same Same Shop, which makes a perfect duplicate of any object a customer brings in. It becomes important to the plot when Percy accidentally has the shop duplicate his project notes, and then an avalanche of papers just start appearing everywhere and destroying the world (yes, really).

But, you know, I'm not even going to go into all of that, because I can't think of anything interesting to say about it. This book is dreamlike and weird; we have established this. It's about copying, remixing, repurposing; established that too.

-----------

And that's what frustrated me so much about this book. It has this deeply cynical view of the creative process, the very possibility of discovering something new or composing something unique. It often seems dementedly proud of how little sense it makes, the absurd way it has devoured its influences and spewed out this strange and stinking melange. After all, that's its entire thesis statement: Creativity is just regurgitation. All apparent innovations are just marketing buzzwords. Everything is fake and pointless.

But if I believed that, I wouldn't be reading fiction.

There were times that I thought Same Same might be going somewhere interesting. A few moments where the curtain is pulled back and we get some hints about what the Institute might really be and why Percy's narration is so fickle and odd. At these points I was genuinely intrigued. I am not immune to the charms of metafiction! I have unironically loved many a pretentious author-insert, many a book-within-a-book! But those moments just fizzled out in the end, as if the book were afraid to commit to any particular scenario, and then it ended with a pages-long "salute... to crap made of other crap."

Ugh. What a waste of time.

-----------


Original comments:

Went to buy textbooks today and mysteriously ended up browsing the SFF section. I knew nothing about this book or its author, but that cover just called to me.

[Deborah Ross]

I found this book interesting at first, with isolated Institute for artistic colleagues and its self-indulgent elitist Institute and meaningless but portentous discussions about creativity. The Same-Same shop, which repairs everything from a stained uniform to a PDA "device," intrigued me. I thought that when the narrator inadvertently left his notes for his Project at the Same-Same shop, the notes would be changed into a piece so brilliant they changed the world. But from that point, papers -- piles and piles of papers -- started taking over and the story took a seriously demented turn. I thought the narrator was mentally ill, the Institute a psych ward, and all those papers the novels he has cut up and pasted together for his Project. That's not at all what the description of the book says, though. I think my version fits the text better. If that's true, the book is way, way too long with its word-salad, several-pages-long sentences. The point could have been gotten across without wading through endless verbiage.

The one moment I felt a connection with the narrator came at the very end, when he looks in a mirror and realizes he is old. That doesn't justify the length of the book, as it is perfectly feasible to portray the passage of time more succinctly, but it was poignant.

I would have liked to learn at some point exactly what the narrator's mental illness was.

Verdict: perfectly competent prose, a deep understanding of institutional manipulation and reality distortion, but ultimately unsatisfying.

The usual disclaimer: I received a review copy of this book, but no one bribed me to say anything in particular about it.

[Lemar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Peter Mendelsund is alive to the ghosts of writers and artists who precede him, he is crowded by Ted Talkers. There is hardly room on the page for him to write.
This feeling of claustrophobia and self-doubt permeate this inventive yet exhausting novel. His setting one Jorge Luis Borges would love and his characters could survive in a David Foster Wallace novel. The kinship with my favorite artists point to a promising future for this first time novelist. He is excruciatingly aware that there is little plot here, nothing is happening, but he has a point to make about the echoes we hear in our heads and is uncompromising in his journey through his hall of mirrors. Housed in an, “utter void...our minds are forced to compensate by repopulating the world with ideas.”
He is relevant to our moment in technology, “No one gets lost. Not anymore. And what is this like, to be unable, literally unable to disorient oneself? We take this state of geographical surety for granted, don’t we (late times) but it is a kind of hell.”
“The grid here is not so much a case of us watching you as you broadcasting YOURSELF.”
Mendelsund does not duck questions of time and death. “I am nothing but an atmospheric density. A field of meaning.”
I am left with the feeling that this should be a five star book, that it’s my laziness and dullness that kept me looking to see how many more pages until the end!

[Nathanimal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here be shenanigans. This is the kind of novel you don’t see around as much anymore, a metafictional send-up of the experience of writing, a book whose favorite theme is itself. You’re not allowed for one whole minute to forget that what you’re reading is not the thing itself but a representation of the thing. For chrissake one of the minor character’s names is an emoji.

And while metafiction might seem old fashioned, I ask you, since Barth and Barthelme do we find ourselves in any LESS drowning in representation, our lives any less constructed from the immaterial emanations of mass info-production? (How do I know any of you are even real on here? If you aren’t don’t tell me. I enjoy this too much.)

This isn’t to say Same Same doesn’t also perform the necessary upgrades. The viral ease with which information replicates itself is at the heart of the story. There may be a smidge of wonder, too, at the great big world-data-processing-unit that is making you / making me / making all this.

The writing here is just grand. Intelligent. Funny. Self-depreciating. The right cocktail of high and low register, earnestness and clowning around. I didn’t even mind all the LOL’s and brb’s and W/r/t’s—by which I imagine a book could easily self-immolate before I’ve decided if it has anything interesting to say or not.

This was my “summer read.” I don’t know why. Probably because it had the right heft and because I didn’t know anything about it beyond the book flap—I saw some promise but the stakes were low. It was just for fun. I’m not sure how interested I would’ve been had I known a lot about the book, writing about writing being less of an interest for me these days. So I feel like I lucked out. This is a book I’ll keep around and read again.

[daemyra, the realm's delight · Rating 3 out of 5]

You can consider this quote from Same Same my review of Same Same:

I grab my book, the huge novel I’ve been labouring to read, and settle in but I only get through a couple of pages before the words begin to slur. The writing is too high-minded and complex for me (though its protagonist, strangely, seems to be a simpleton of some kind). Either way, a chore.

Percy Forbisher, the protagonist of Same Same, arrives at an advanced Institute built in the desert by a local oligarch in order to complete his mysterious academic project. The Institute "belongs to a different world; a no-place; a kind of Cockaigne," and it "has a way of encouraging one to...linger." Peter Mendelsund's Acknowledgements, written in a similarly self-indulgent manner, states Same Same "was heavily influenced (Rather obviously) by Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain."

If this is you:



Don't worry. The enjoyable moments to Same Same are still there for you to have. Same Same is really lyrical. Some of the most pleasing moments arise from Mendelsund describing a particular space in time: "around a conference table barnacled with speakerphones"; "her hands are facing upward...occasionally twitching or pulsing inward, like upended crabs"; "the nicely cooled breezes blow in, jellyfishing the curtains"; "Mr. Royal's skinny leg... which is oscillating up and down like a sewing machine bobbin"; "diving board, which is rough like a tongue"; "our bus sidles up alongside a wall of brick, stone, earth, partially buried, piercing through the dunes like stitching in cloth."

It was lovely to read slowly, with Mendelsund's creative grip of descriptive language. Scrunch is a verb - so is humble, and ghost. I particularly liked how he described how we turned on our phones: "whisper awake my device."

Yet Same Same, to pull another quote from Same Same: "isn't really, like, 'a novel', not in the traditional sense. It is kind of a grab bag. There is little in the way of development. No dramatic turns of event. And the narrator may be unreliable."

I mean, when you read Percy's fundaments, or his principles, guiding his project, you'll feel the fear and anxiety sinking in.



You know when you force yourself to read and you don't want to read anything for a while? Oh, that was how I felt. There were humourous and beautiful parts, but it was frustrating and too unstable to be consistently engaged in.

[Alexander Peterhans]

Stopping at page 254.

I quite enjoyed it at the start, more Ballardian than Ballard himself, funny, just on the right side of quirky.

And then it suddenly became a slog. I would stop reading and not pick it up again for a couple of days at a time. And at a certain point you just have to be honest, and let it go.

[jeremy · Rating 4 out of 5]

the debut novel from knopf associate art director peter mendelsund (and author of what we see when we read), same same is a wild ride through a techno-utopian institutional futurescape set within a middle eastern desert. mendlesund's story teems with ideas about creativity, identity, and authenticity, hued with dark, dystopian overtones of authoritarianism and manufactured façade. same same is philosophical, playful, and pointed and mendelsund clearly must have had a blast writing it. far-reaching in scope, clever in its composition, and perhaps a little too smart for its own good, same same unnerves just as much as it entertains.

as i listen to the director's speech from the periphery of the gathering, i notice that the audience encircling our master of ceremonies has been made (i want to say: biddable?). it is the theater of the thing. they cease to be an aggregation of individuals and instead have become a single organism: a creature that responds quickly and obediently to the prompts provided it; clapping, grumbling, cheering, etc. we are enjoying ourselves, i think. or, they are. all of them. committed, fervent. feelings i simply can't manage.

[Audra (ouija.reads) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Peter Mendelsund has long been on my radar as my favorite cover designer—I swear I can spot a Mendelsund cover face out on any shelf upon entering a bookstore. What a truly wonderful surprise to find out he is a talented wordsmith as well as a designer!

While this story is probably not for everyone (though I’m going to recommend it to everyone like it is), if you are someone who struggles and triumphs through your own creative pursuit day after day, you will find much in this book to relate to. It is a story working on several different levels: it is telling a story of its own, imitating a story, offering a metafictional inditement about identity and simulacra, and inciting a book-length metaphor all at once. It both exists as a novel and as a parody of the form all at once.

And not only that (as if all that weren’t enough), but it is also impeccably crafted, a true masterwork of language with innovative stylistic choices, vivid and unique imagery, and great characterization. I expect many more novels to come from Mendelsund.

It took me a while to fully settle into the story, and while I generally speed through a book in two to three days, this novel took me about a month to read. Every time I opened it up, I fell into a meditative rhythm that I don’t often find while reading and I really felt that I was absorbing every word, every sentence, every sentiment.

One of the most intriguing paths of the book is a strange shop that main character Percy visits, the titular Same Same shop, where anything Percy gives the proprietor is replicated to perfection. So begs the question (that Baudrillard would have us ask) which is original? Which is real? And does it matter?

All of a sudden, something clicked for me. This wasn’t just a story about a man who comes to a secluded Institute to finish his unspecified great project alongside other fellows, it was an extended metaphor for the creative process, for the idea that nothing exists, nothing is real, unless we create it—pluck it from the thin air of our thoughts and write it, dance it, code it, build it—whatever.

Toward the end, the book turns inward, reflecting on self-identity, the nature of individuality, and revealing Percy as an unreliable narrator.

I loved every minute of this book. It is one I feel I need to read again to fully comprehend, and I’d do so gratefully, just to spend more time between the covers. Unmistakably, a work of great care and genius.

My thanks to Vintage/Random House for my copy of this one to read and review.

[Justin Hairston · Rating 3 out of 5]

Utterly baffling. The contest for strangest book I’ve ever read is permanently closed.

It’s not bad, just staggeringly obscure. And avant-garde. And surreal. And sort of like a bizarro "The Circle".

I don’t even know how to explain it because I don’t even know how to understand it. It starts off as sort of a minimalistic sci-fi mystery with notes of meta-fiction, but it soon starts (and certainly never stops) morphing into a ludicrously wild performance art version of a novel, or a novel-by-parts, and it starts metaphorically sketching the very process of writing a (presumably this?) novel, but in a much less certain way than I’ve just described, it that’s possible.

It’s funny and engaging at parts, and nary a book has ever so rapidly convinced me of its author’s genius than this, but it might be a bit much for me. I sort of liked the explosively abstract finale, and some of the artsier touches appealed to my pretentious inclinations, but the work as a whole feels a few hundred layers of allegory too dense. The author’s other work, “What We See When We Read,” is a thrilling read that convinced me the author had a vice grip on the very concept of the experience of reading. While that certainly may be true, rather than lean on those concepts to concoct a thrilling novel, he’s apparently sought to subvert and implode the very tropes and mechanisms he previously examined, to somewhat vertigo-inducing effect. I don’t know who I’d ever recommend this too, but I think I’d still read more from him, and I’d certainly love to discuss it with someone.

[Eleanor Imbody]

This was an interesting read; a deeply literary and self-indulgent (in a good way) intellectual exploration of language, art, creativity, genius, and material/intellectual culture in a technological age. Not my typical fare but I ended up really enjoying it. Reminded me at times of Dave Eggers's The Circle (MC arrives wide-eyed at a techno-utopia only to find it increasingly unsettling...) but with less fearmongering and more magical realism (and more about art than privacy) -- Same Same is definitely less commercial and more literary/experimental. Highly recommend this for artists and academics with interest in art/lit theory, and readers with patience who enjoy slow, ruminative, intelligent, bizarro stories. Also recommend this for fans of Don DeLillo (especially Zero K). I found the image of an idealized School of Athens-esque fellowship institute where fellows talk and argue but never seem to get anything done darkly humorous and true to life. Mendelsund does some really interesting things with language (the use of internet slang/acronyms and non-Latin alphabet symbols) that will prove fascinating for those interested in simulacra and who are prepared to read deeply/thoughtfully.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

[Brian S · Rating 2 out of 5]

OVERALL RATING: 2 stars (3 out of 10)
Plot: 1 stars
Pacing: 1 stars
Writing Style/Quality: 2 stars
Characterization: 2 stars
World Building: 3 stars
---------------------------------

Too meta and clever for its own good, this writer's attempt at a fan fiction homage to The Magic Mountain falls short in my view. Not really even a novel (there really is no story or narrative per-se), I think this book is completely mis-categorized as Science Fiction (perhaps that was my own mistake!). I do believe there are solid moments of insight, interest, and spurts of creative writing to be had here, but it probably needed a few more rounds of editing, and a much stronger publisher's hand to be successful for me.

I suppose as a first real attempt at literary "fiction", this still is a solid start. Just know going in that this may not be the kind of book you hoped for.

[Erin Russo · Rating 1 out of 5]

Same Same was..... Exhausting. The book as a whole is really insightful and interesting, but reading it was not an enjoyable experience. In fact, I've spoken many times over the course of reading it just how much I hate it. It is not a long book, but some of the pages feel never-ending because I truly just don't care what he's talking about. I found myself skimming a few sections or chapters of the book until it piqued my interest again. It wasn't until the last 1/4 of the book that I could see the larger picture and the story had some redemption.

As another reviewer said, if you enjoy most reading because of the plot, dialogue, character development and interactions then this is not the book for you.

[Shawna Alpdemir · Rating 1 out of 5]

So thrilled to be done with this book. It was chosen as my company’s reading club book eons ago and I’ve been struggling to get through it since. I am finally free! The plot is boring but stylistically the writing is what completely renders the text unreadable. Annoying alliteration. Lofty, boorish vocabulary mixed with text acronyms. I didn’t find anything about this book to be inspired - or inspiring. I’ll think twice before picking anything up by this author ever again.

[Jay Batson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Full disclosure: I was provided a free copy of this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review, which I believe I'm providing.

I can barely think of a way to write a review about this book without revealing a massive spoiler. But ahead I plow.

This book takes deeply into the story of Percy, who undertakes a special project in a special place. He is surrounded by a collection of people that provide a background onto which Percy's live to be unfolded, and so for the duration of the book, we occupy Percy's mind as he attempts to complete his work in this background.

This is a complete immersion into Percy's psyche; as the Percy's project proceeds, we experience it entirely from Percy's first-person perception of it - not as an independent viewer listening to a narrative and plot being woven by an author.

And Percy has a unique way of perceiving & processing what is happening around him. He dives deep, wide, and flies all around it while trying to assimilate it. Important elements of information and experience around his project emerge from a special shop - the Same Same - that fixes things that Percy has found awry, often with surprising impact. Pages and pages of paper in this book are spent with us accompanying Percy on his journey of mentally processing the fundaments of his project and the things that emerge from the Same Same.

And here's where I have to figure out whether I actually liked being part of that journey. Percy's walk around the information he must process can become ... tedious. The author - in order for us to truly understand what it's like to be part of Percy's information processing - doesn't hold back on this tedium. A given moment in time can go on for either a single sentence, or for a chapter of flowing, wide-ranging consideration of all the aspects and implications of that moment.

Here's an example of percy, describing Miss 🙂, the Brand Analyst:

Simple, you'd think. One of these: 🙂. But no, no, she's a forward arrow: →. Or, a fingerpost. Better still, just a finger, pointing; 👉. For the jolly little trendsetter that she is: a disembodied finger. A finger with a pretty little pink nail. Pointer finger. Trigger finger; pew, pew. Digitus secundus. It's perfect actually-- as apical creative and ideation manager at a creative consultancy responsible for branding, systematic trend-watching, scenario development, and visioning. A modern oracle, she is. A roadmapper. A strategic consultant. Sniffs for trends, and then sells forecasts to high-bidding clothing manufacturers, game designers, packaging specialists, fashion conglomerates, entertainment studios, food labs, app developers, and even, ouroboros-like, to other creative foresight consultancies. For a not-insignificant outlay of money she will tell you what that color, that style, that phrase, that cadence, that disposition or humor, that taste will be--the one which will appeal next season, next year, in ten years, as far down the pike as you wanted her to look, all the way to the end of cindered time. Incredibly high success rate: predictions-to-outcomes. Day after day, in her office, diode-lit by three monitors, tabs open, phone lines on speaker, silent feeds us polling, networks and platforms auto-updating, page-view by page-view, analytic by analytic, click after click, vibrating with the hum of cooling fans and brushed by the building's ventilation, peering at now's entrails, its wasted wants, its dissatisfactions and refuse, reading in this...

The depth to which Percy goes to think through situations increases steadily as the book proceeds. Around halfway through the book, I started to have difficulty being interested the full depth of Percy's reflections. So much so that I started skimming. And skimming faster and faster. I had to ask myself the question "Do I care about Percy's explorations of this next moment?" Too-often, the answer was "No", and I skimmed faster, only occasionally slowing to make sure I didn't lose the plot line.

Which is sad, because the work done by the author here to craft Percy's explorations is monumental. It must have taken an incredible dedication to descend so deeply into what Percy is thinking. A bit of a descent into hell, from my perspective.

At the end, we see the the ultimate completion of Percy's mission. And if the reader - like me - is skimming too-fast by that point, it's possible to miss this. And even when revealed, the completion is so obscured buy Percy's analysis of it that it's almost hard to grok the final outcome.

There's a part of me that says "A good editor might push the author to shorten this book by 25% and make the book more palatable." The other part of me says "It is precisely the tedium that you dislike that makes the book effective; shortening that would reduce its impact." This might be true; but at its current length, I struggled mightily to finish it (actually complaining to my wife about its endlessness), and concluded I had not enjoyed it by the time I was done.

At the end of the day, I think this book will be seen as a masterwork by a particular type of reader - the ones where the point of reading the book is to examine what the author can do given the challenge of writing from Percy's perspective. But people who thrive on narrative, plot, story, interactions between characters, and the structure of a "normal" novel are unlikely to enjoy this. I must say I'm one of those, If I were providing a rating based on this element alone, I would have given this a 1-2 star rating.

OTOH, given the incredible depth the author has plumbed, and the level of intensity of that effort, I'm going to give this three stars out of respect fort the effort. My normal rating rules - https://startupdj.com/book-rating-rules - might demand 4 stars. But, when all is said and done, I didn't *enjoy* this book enough to give it 4 stars.

[David Jacobson · Rating 5 out of 5]

In "Same Same", one of the most engrossing and thought-provoking contemporary novels I have read, Peter Mendelsund applies his finely balanced sense for satire to increasingly big game: first the global Big Ideas industry of retreats and TED Talks (here called the "Discourse(™)"), then to the process of writing, then to the process of living itself. He achieves this in the form of a novel that is about a reluctant novelist writing a novel, and is also that reluctant novelist's output: this is his novel.

The novel succeeds where it could have badly failed: it is a deconstruction of the novel in the form of very readable novel. It has one central character—the reluctant novelist, Percy Frobisher—who I cared about and believed in, even as I knew he was totally unreliable (reliable, even, in relating what? This is his fictional story). There was, at the beginning, a well-formed plot that had me wondering: what is going to happen to this character? Seamlessly, as the novel progressed, the plot became jumbled and unimportant in equal proportion to a new question arising: what is going to happen to this novel?

“‘Could the providing of the prompt itself be a prompt?’ I ask him. And he shrugs. ‘Only if your project were a project about projects.’”

In 2021, I re-read Same Same after having read Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, upon which Mendelsund draws heavily. It is the thick, canonical tomb that our narrator finds unassailably uninteresting. This book is filled with references and allusions to that century-old work, all scrambled and, in many cases, bearing completely new meaning. It is another layer through which Mendelsund makes his argument for creativity as collage. We are awash in the literary output of thousands of years of history, all that paper bearing down on us. “Consider,” Mendelsund writes, “that the paper is not, in fact, white. With all the words that have been written already, down the eons, by all those others?” Where does one find “some room to write my own thoughts down”?

In The Magic Mountain, the story pivots around a scene on the Walpurgis Night. There is a Walpurgisnacht in Same Same as well; although, the real distillation of the novel’s central idea comes in a different scene, out in the desert (though still at night), when one of Frobisher’s fellow-travelers gives his Discourse™ and unveils a statue that is constructed as this novel is: “a towering god; constituted of naming rights and overlapping consensus polls. An answer to a series of aesthetic-preference research surveys; a perfect being, as arrived at through the application of clickbait questionaries; a god of the comments section…A god of now.”

Such is Same Same: a sampling of past treatments of the human condition, “transposed into a contemporary milieu”. Just as one’s present life is one’s past life similarly transposed. And just, as Mendelsund argues, is all creative work. But surely new ideas must slip in from time to time? Yes, but perhaps less often than we might presume. For Mendelsund places The Magic Mountain at the center of his borrowing and, in exposing that classic of German literature to the air and sunlight, we see that it, too, is formed in the same way! For is not Settembrini a mouthpiece for Italian humanism? Is not Naphtha a mouthpiece for fanatical nihilism? And is not the séance scene—which is frankly an unsightly ink stain on the whole edificace—transposed straight out of the pulpy pseudoscience of the day?

[Annie · Rating 4 out of 5]

If anyone could work out the precise formula for productive creativity would never have to worry about money every again–or for their children, or grandchildren, or great-grandchildren, etc. etc. But one has to wonder, especially after reading Same Same by Peter Mendelsund (or seen Hollywood’s lineup for the last several years), if devising a formula wouldn’t strip the life out of whatever the mass produced artists came up with. In this strange, constantly morphing novel, Percy Frobisher arrives at the Freehold, an experimental artists’ community. Percy arrives with a vague plan to create something and a drug habit. This art makes sense. Subsequent events get distinctly surreal...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.

[Kevin Ng]

I thought I could push through it, but gave up after 5 chapters.

Reading this was like looking into a greasy mirror and only seeing the grease. The prose felt like linguistic gymnastics where I would find my mind tumbling deep into a slur three pages into a reading session.

I was excited to pick this up since I've followed his book design work for a while. Perhaps one of his later works...

[Candy Bobryk · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's just so wordy, and with no real payoff for the excess. The characters are difficult to connect with... I really tried, I love the concept of the same same shop, and kept with it to see where it would go... for me... it was boring. Just finished it feeling confused.

[Ryan · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's very, very rare that I can't make it through a book. It happens maybe once every two years or so. It happened with this book.

[Rob · Rating 2 out of 5]

If he'd just allowed this book to be the kind of South American Magical Realist novel it wanted to be then it might have ended up ... delightful? Instead it's — well not quite a hot mess but so very close to it.

There are better reviews of this book out there eviscerating it for its overreach on the self-referential post-modernist angle and I will LET YOU ALL SEEK THEM OUT because I can't write that review as well as has already been written. Just know that that's a thing.

But there's two bits about this that bugged me -- I mean REALLY bugged me and one may seem like a nit-pick and the other a bit more... substantive. So here we go.

First the nit-pick:

- Tbh
- Irl
- W/e
- Brb
- even a → ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

FFS STOP THAT SHIT! I get it. No, really. I get it. But it's also COMPLETELY INSUFFERABLE and not clever at all just obnoxious.

Secondly:

It really (and I mean really) ground my gears that the book WENT THERE w/r/t/ the suggestion that the whole Institute thing was a hallucinated conceit — that Frobisher was in a mental health institution the whole time. That the novel decided to perpetuate that horrific stereotype of genius = madness and that Frobisher (or anyone else for that matter) couldn't just produce their work and that being creative was DIFFICULT and at times FRUSTRATING but instead we had had to continue with that HARMFUL CLICHÉ wherein a creative person is somehow ill — that the only way to create GENIUS WORK is to also be MENTALLY UNFIT and for the prose to phase in and out of that and eventually get you (the reader) to that place where you're like "oh yeah Frobisher isn't even real he's just the narrator and so a figment of the imagination of the writer who is the ACTUAL NARRATOR &c." and get all weirdly recursive and FFS not only has this been done before, but it has NEVER BEEN AN ACTUAL GOOD IDEA in the history of fiction and here it's just ham-fisted and dull.

Which is a damn shame because there's a lot of `chef_kiss.gif` sparkling prose and I just wish he's let it be Magical Realism™ instead of this death spiral.

[Cam Hoff · Rating 1 out of 5]

A staggeringly over-ambitious concept to attempt as one's first novel, Fwiw.

[Metaphorosis · Rating 2 out of 5]

2 stars, Metaphorosis Reviews

Summary:
A man is invited to a remote Institute to pursue a research project, and finds it difficult to focus.

Review:
Peter Mendelsund clearly has a great command of language. Unfortunately, he appears to have little to say. Alternatively, his message is intended for a very select group. While Same Same’s prose has style and rhythm, the entirety of the book suggests that it’s a an in joke about publishing for publishing insiders – all allusion and implication, with no substance. That may be deliberate – to the extent the book is about anything, it’s a satirical comment on the triumph of form over substance, of framing over results. What that says about Mendelsund’s view of his day job as a cover designer, I’m not sure.

Overall, the book comes across as self-indulgent, heavy-handed commentary, and yet it’s unclear what it’s commentary on. It’s a high concept novel, but only for those in the know – an elaborate experiment that somehow got published. Even Mendelsund seems to recognize this – his narrator is forever reading an interminable novel that he describes as “torturously long-winded” and “too high minded and complex for me (though its protagonist, strangely, seems to be a simpleton”. Meta-references aside, Mendelsund seems to have attempted to demonstrate sophistication through a deliberate opacity appealing to as small an audience as possible. While it draws heavily from Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, it doesn’t add anything substantive to the concept.

With great tenacity, I made it about halfway through before I started to skim. Toward the end, the book turns more sharply toward metafiction, but in the end, the exercise struck me as almost completely pointless. I don’t doubt that somewhere, there’s an in-crowd that gets all the references, or that it would be possible to convince ‘sophisticates’ that this is a work of profound depth. It’s not; it is a book about emptiness that is itself empty.

I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

[Cheyanne Lepka · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is going to be a short review, because I’m not sure I can truly give do it justice without rereading the book. Same, same was absolutely everything I hoped it would be. It was bizarre in all the right ways, and hit just so close to home on creativity, and putting everything you have into a project—more over the pressure that comes from doing so. Percy’s voice is expertly crafted, entertaining and off-putting. His ruminations are fascinating and bizarre in the same breath, devolving into stranger and stranger things throughout the book. Particularly interesting are the other characters in the book, they’re what you would imagine from a group of people who have willingly secluded themselves in the desert to work on their passion-projects—bizarre, passionate and interesting. I have never seen someone capture so perfectly what it’s like to be a writer on the page, and I’m certain this is a book that I’m going to reread multiple times.

Anyway, I would recommend this book to anyone who loves bizarre speculative fiction, who doesn’t mind an unreliable (and sometimes absurd) narrator, and needs just a little bit of surrealism in their life. But, I’m going to say this, this is a book I recommend savoring.

[J Wahl · Rating 1 out of 5]

One of the least interesting books that I have ever read. I kept reading the book hoping it would improve but it didn't.

This was a book club selection and of the 20 or so people who attended the discussion of this book only three said that they enjoyed the book. Many of us in attendance gave up reading and chose not to finish the book.

There is a telling paragraph in the book, location 3327 where Mendelsund, the books author, describes the protagonists' dislike of a book that the protagonist is reading, "This is one seriously tedious read.." says the protagonist. Yes, I agree with you Mr. Mendelsund!

And Mendelsund continues with this theme and wrote more comments for his protagonist, "Hundreds of pages of (albiet transcendent) sick-lit. The protagonist: a real boob. And all the other characters: flat as can be. Worse, they are mere mouthpieces for the author's abstract interests. Wooden all of them. It is all handled so clumsily."

Those sentences provided by the books author sum up my impressions of this book. It was at this point that I decided that this book was going no where for me and I stopped reading it.

[Johan · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Same Same shop produces copies of the item you hand in, but of a superior quality/nature. Hand in a broken tem, get it back better than new! Sounds incredible, right? And imagine the possibilities if you hand in tech. But NO, this novel is NOT about some magical shop and the greed and folly of humanity. Instead it's a novel about a man in a weird institute filled with (oft-times) nameless characters that look askance (even with mirth), on the main character. Why? He has no idea. But you will find out, kind of, and the reason behind it all is a piece of fiction trying to justify its own existence, and doing a poor job of it. It wasn't so much a poor read, it just didn't amount to much. If you need a plot driven book, definitely keep moving.

[Realms & Robots · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m obsessed with the complete strangeness that is Same Same. Imagine a city built in the middle of a desert, populated entirely by people who are SO passionate about their incredibly specific interests that they can barely speak to other people. Now, imagine those people are allowed to spend every minute of the day pursuing their passion projects on someone else’s dime. You’d get a strange crowd to be sure, and it makes for satisfying people watching. This is an incredibly imaginative microcosm, with narration by a fascinating character.

NOTE: I was provided a free copy of this book via NetGalley in exchange for my honest, unbiased review.

[Jacquelyn · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wish I could give this book a better review. The beginning showed such promise, and the author is supremely competent with language.

But there was a point at which the story, intentionally, went off the rails and I found myself unable to follow. Even so there were moments of brilliant clarity towards the end. Ultimately I find myself not recommending this book unless you want to see if you can follow it through to the end better than I.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a solid, if somewhat disturbing, sci-fi novel written by a very smart author. A bit absurd, it held my attention overall with interesting characters, a fun study of creativity, and a little mystery thrown-in. The author obviously had fun writing it, and I'm prompted to check out his other (future) novels. I really appreciate the advanced copy!!

[Hatezel · Rating 1 out of 5]

Got bored of it