Nick Calabrese’s Reviews > The Lost Scrapbook > Status Update

Just hit a boring section and then the text fractures back to the previous part and the speaker is both the last fragment and the current, and he’s interrupted by the police office taking a statement who basically says “come on now, get on with it” but has the energy of

Me: Is the natural state of the soul quiet or chaos?

Taco Bell cashier: Look buddy, it’s transient, shifting like water

Liking it a lot more now. I think this is how other people feel reading The Rings of Saturn. It’s like if W.G. Sebald had ADHD and was actually just David Foster Wallace when he’s doing a Don DeLillo impression.

I thought the opening few pages were a bit corny. Very nineties-quirky-outsider but as I progress, I’m liking it a lot more. Initially was worried about no chapter breaks, but there are logical endpoints (though Dara tries to obfuscate them). Tried an experiment timing each page I read and found that this is more DFW than Pynchon — that is, it’s wordy, but not actually hard. More fun than first pages suggest.