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A fascinating narrator's voice. Klara is an AF (articial friend), a sentient humanoid AI. The more she learns, the more individualized and sentient she gets. She sees the world differently. She doesn't know simple concepts like the sun going down because the Earth moves. But her recognition is perfect and her memory is eidetic. Her relationship to her owner Josie is hierarchical, as are her feelings.

The coping compass is the most important and the weakest part of the book. Lobo tries to give it an optimistic spin when it comes to the individual, pointing to the most unhappy people of society, the ones most lost. Die Reichsbürger. After all, who wants to be unhappy all the time? Of all things, he points to Tiktok for the potential to find positive interaction and trust groups.

The complicated present contributed its share to the confidence crisis. The handling of the corona crisis, deteriorating infrastructure due to fiscal austerity, paid science and representation of minority opinions as equal, the intergenerational contract not holding up. The effect of AI has to be seen yet.

No big surprises in the situation analysis of the loss of confidence. People used to trust institutions. Now they trust peer groups. The possibility of transparency led to demanding it. While distrust to institutions used to be left-wing, it switched massively to the right. Mass media crisis, social media pushing populistic emotional messages and troll factories did contribute. Next: Chinese AI influencing.

I read books by Pynchon or Vollmann. But I often have difficulties understanding Lobo's columns on Spiegel Online. This is easier to understand. The long form seems to help him to give his thoughts the room they need.

Let a little magic in your life. Sell your soul to the devil, (s)he can give it to god. The Faustian Vica. A dose of German magical realism. I haven't waited for it. I will stay an NPC, one of those beyond the middle of their life still watching TV and having no access to the magic.
Rampant greenery and shrooms, lightnings and avalanches, nature is another source of magic.

The voice irritates me. Berlin hipster bubble. At the same time, Wenzel sounds often female. Calling his phone smartie? The main characters are intendedly extraordinary while the rest of the cast are clichés. Developments are caused by external events such as being hit by a lightning.
Still a fun read so far when taken lightly.

Was this dark academia fantasy? Transgressive thinking is a topic. And Clarke's world is original. Transgression between realities. The house being one, not ours. Academical hybris vs. speaking with everything in the world. And the world replying, caring. Done as a diary of Piranesi, as he was called. There's magic in our world as well. Just open your eyes and see it.

Starts as a (sur)real tale of a man in a neverending house reminding of the labyrinth of the minotaur. Ende's Der Spiegel im Spiegel came to my mind. There is an "Other", he knows since years. The man just learns that there are more people. And that he knew more before and forgot. Or is he getting mad?
I start to wonder. Is this house as real as it appears? Did it come to existence by pure thought, as an experiment?

I start to understand. Whatever the party holds to be truth, is truth. Power of the party is not a means, it is an end. How can I get rid of my OLDTHINK. I want to GOODTHINK. I want to love BIG BROTHER. This is the only love there will be.

Put a CRIMESETOP to doubting the anti-sex league. Sex is dangerous and diminishes the necessary zeal in hating our enemies. DOUBLETHINK! The hierarchy has to be permanently guaranteed by poverty and ignorance. The constant war is essential by burning production. Only then, peace is achieved. Internalize BLACKWHITE. Only if you believe that black is white, you fulfill your service to BIG BROTHER.

Doesn't feel old at all. Flatscreens on the wall, surveillance cameras, creating alternative facts for history. If there is anything odd, it is the split of society into 15% citizens and 85% proles who live according to other standards. Orwell's socialist background comes through in attributing them the only hope for change. At least in Winston's opinion.

Had one or two attempts to read as a teenager but always committed the THOUGHTCRIME of abandonment. This will be the VICTORY read. Even so, NEWSPEAK settled into the collective mind. Nowadays, more true than ever. BIG BROTHER is real. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

Audiobook. In 12 hours and I lost interest in details. Evil for the sake of evil. American history is one conspiracy according to Ellroy. It starts in the aftermath of the JFK assassination. Again, three main baddies killing their way behind the scenes. So far, it's mostly about organized crime conning Hughes into buying out Vegas. Trafficking heroine from Vietnam is next on the agenda. More assassinations to follow.

You look back at your own life and wonder how you could have missed out on living it. But then, none of these guys made it to 50. Nowadays, each of them would be diagnosed at least with ADHD with Dean (Neal Cassady) probably being manic.
In a scene in a Frisco flat, the wifes rightly point out to Dean his narcissistic transgressing irresponsible behaviour. One paragraph against a praise of it for the rest.

When is too much too much? Nothing would have been missed if the last two chapters (140 pages) weren't included. Which is valid for at least a third of the pages. But then, this is the concept of Parallel Stories. Life is a lot of them at the same time and only together a world comes into being.

Against better knowledge, I was hoping for a resolution for some of the open endings. Instead, the penultimate chapter of 100 pages introduces completely new characters, only related to a minor character.

Closure has been granted to only a few strands so far, usually by death. In one particularly perfidious case Nadas mentions that the secret only will be shared far in the future of the novel's scope.

Some more recurring topics: architecture, epilepsy.

And a few more connections show up, one of them after more than 1,400 pages. The inspector from Berlin is the son of someone growing up in the institute of racial biology with Hans von Wolkenstein. Klara, Kristof's romantic interest, is the daughter of Geheimrat Vay, the one responsible for the deportation of Jews in 1944.

A 1000 pages later, we learn that the taxi driver is Captain Bellardi. Gripping political machinations are followed by the plodding plot of Kristof.

Recurring motives: abandonment by parents, betrayal (among friends, by partners, politically), persecution (by nationalists, communists, Germans, Russians), homosexuality (gay, lesbian, bisexual).

Currently, two narrations are interchanging.
Germany before the war with a focus on Hans von Wolkenstein being committed to a national socialist experimental facility for bastard children to conduct racial studies on them.
Hungary 1961 with Kristof being the third wheel on the way to a party with the waitress Klara and her partner. The city is in a state of emergency.
The storyline of Kristof is dragging.

One of the big topics is jewish life and the holocaust. Some narrations stop suddenly, others appear almost out of nowhere with people being mentionedhundreds of pages earlier with only a few sentences.
The racial scientists von der Schuer and von Thun zu Wolkenstein work on the preparations for the annihilation of the Hungarian jews.

Many chapters are almost short stories in itself. They are moments in time in which the reader follows the thoughts and observations of characters from the main cast or characters only appearing in this chapter, almost unnoticeably linked to the rest. Through their thoughts, more relevant aspects of the time are introduced to the narration. Nádas crafts extraordinarily rich and unique characters.

Less than 1,000 to go. Captain Bellardi and the architect Madzar talk on the Danube luxury steamboat about lots of nullities. They were friends in school. The captain explains how each dish they eat is cooked. He never mentions the task he wants to give to Madzar. There is something dark with someone in their shared past which isn't mentioned either.
Parallelity of what is said and what is not said.

Gyöngyver walking along the floor after sex with Agost leads to her landlord Irma's eschewed affair with her architect before the war and revisits their promenade on Margaret Island.
Kristof's visit to the café to ask the waitress for a date triggers memories of fall 1956 when Russian tanks shot this house and forced Kristof and his family to hide in the cellar.
One situation, a lot of introspection and digressions.

On the Buda side of the Danube, four old ladies play their roles while playing cards. Only their inner thoughts reflect their real torments.
Meanwhile, opposite on Margaret Island - the local gay meetup at night, Kristof does the opposite. He fights his inner demons in the woods torn between succumbing to the gay hunting prey and ending his suffering by jumping from a Danube bridge.

Book 1 finished. Exhausting incomprehensible meandering alternates with sharp dissecting passages. Within a sentence, the narration leaves the one-backed animal of Gyöngyver and Agost to follow her landlord Irma to her round of cards with her three old friends. Before that, she surprised the both of them and, pretending to not noticing, talked with Gyöngyver about the most mundane subjects.

Agost and Gyöngyver already have sex for 4 days without orgasms. He doesn't want to, she doesn't allow herself to not lose him. 35 pages into the chapter, 115 more. I'm sure, the intercourse will last these pages. Interspersed are inner monologues and reminiscences. The descriptions of sex aren't embarrassing.
Before this chapter, Gyöngyver watched Agost caressing himself naked in the middle of the room for 50 pages.

The company of her son's lover Gyöngyver on the taxi ride to the clinic triggers Erna Lehr to reminisce a lesbian experience in Groningen 30 years ago when the daughter of the hotel owners sucked on her lactivting tit. The ride covers 60 pages.
Parallel stories by structural repetition. The similar layout of the apartments of Döhring's aunt Isolde in Düsseldorf and the Demén's in Budapest is another.

50 pages in Germany 1989 in two locations and 50 pages in Budapest 1961 with detours to the 19th century and 1956. Talk about parallel stories.
The characters are excellently developed, mainly by their thoughts and behaviour with all their faults. One of them, Kristof, might be an alter ego of the author. Or maybe, the dead found on a bench in Berlin 1989.
Not much of the bodily functions mentioned in reviews yet.

Listening to the audiobook. Not sure if it is an effect of listening to the book instead of reading or the type of books I choose as audiobooks. But this is only mildly entertaining and very shallow. No insights extending beyond the individual, Wyoming fulfills every American cliché. His middle brother just died and Meyerhoff returns to Germany.