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mrswhite's review against another edition
4.0
Fittingly, I have no recollection of where I heard about The Amnesiac, and I only have the haziest remembrance of purchasing it. Weirdly, it's as if the little sucker just magically *appeared!* on my bookshelf, where it then sat, gathering dust for ages. And it may have continued to gather dust for quite some time to come, however I spent a lot of time [b:on the road|6288|The Road|Cormac McCarthy|http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/21E8H3D1JSL._SL75_.jpg|3355573] this holiday season and the book I had been reading just wasn't doing it for me. I needed something else, something readable, something fun and something preferably in paperback.
Enter The Amnesiac.:
After breaking his leg on the stairs of his Amsterdam apartment, James Purdew suddenly finds he has time to do something he hasn't done in a long time: think. And as tends to be the case, the more he thinks, the more trouble he finds. His life in Amsterdam starts to fall apart as James becomes increasingly obsessed with three years of his life that have become lost to his memory, those being the years he spent as a college student in the town of H. An avid journaler, James has three journals detailing his life during those missing years, but, for some reason, those journals are locked up in a black safe he keeps under his bed, and he has no idea where the key could be. Clearly, something very bad happened in H., something he once chose to forget, but something he is now hell-bent on remembering.
In an attempt to unlock the mystery of those missing years, James must become the detective of his own mystery. He returns to the British town of H., gets a job fixing up the crumbling remnants of the house where he once lived, and starts unearthing clues to who he was and what happened to him there. The deeper James digs, the stranger things get, as the plot takes a bit of a Gothic turn, where suddenly a 19th century manuscript becomes a key to unlocking the mystery of James' own past.
To paraphrase the blurb on the back of the book, The Amnesiac is described as a time travel book without a time machine, a science fiction book without the aliens, and a murder mystery without the murder. This description is pretty apt, and is a large part of why I liked it so much, despite the fact that it wasn't the most original premise for a book. (At times, the plot felt quite similar to films like Vanilla Sky and Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind.) But even if similar stories have been told before, Taylor sprinkled heavy references to Borges, Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Freudian psychology, Heaven and Hell, and Descartes' solipsistic brand of philosophy (i.e.: "I think, therefore I am.") into his story, using them as clues that continued to keep me thinking and guessing until the end. In The Amnesiac, Taylor has created something more original and intelligent than your average dimestore mystery novel, while still managing to craft a tale that was a whole lot of fun to read.
After skimming some other reviews of this book, it seems as if many folks didn't like it as much as I did, complaining that the ending wasn't very satisfying and that Taylor was a little heavy-handed with the references to Borges and Freud. And those are complaints that I can certainly understand. The Amnesiac is hardly a perfect novel. However, I thoroughly loved it, warts and all. While reading, I, like James, became a detective - underlining clues, scribbling in the margins, and working the story over in my mind long after finishing it.
In short, I can't remember the last time I had so much fun reading a book. I'm not sure whether or not I fell in love with The Amnesiac, but I certainly thought about it a lot when it wasn't around.
Enter The Amnesiac.:
After breaking his leg on the stairs of his Amsterdam apartment, James Purdew suddenly finds he has time to do something he hasn't done in a long time: think. And as tends to be the case, the more he thinks, the more trouble he finds. His life in Amsterdam starts to fall apart as James becomes increasingly obsessed with three years of his life that have become lost to his memory, those being the years he spent as a college student in the town of H. An avid journaler, James has three journals detailing his life during those missing years, but, for some reason, those journals are locked up in a black safe he keeps under his bed, and he has no idea where the key could be. Clearly, something very bad happened in H., something he once chose to forget, but something he is now hell-bent on remembering.
In an attempt to unlock the mystery of those missing years, James must become the detective of his own mystery. He returns to the British town of H., gets a job fixing up the crumbling remnants of the house where he once lived, and starts unearthing clues to who he was and what happened to him there. The deeper James digs, the stranger things get, as the plot takes a bit of a Gothic turn, where suddenly a 19th century manuscript becomes a key to unlocking the mystery of James' own past.
To paraphrase the blurb on the back of the book, The Amnesiac is described as a time travel book without a time machine, a science fiction book without the aliens, and a murder mystery without the murder. This description is pretty apt, and is a large part of why I liked it so much, despite the fact that it wasn't the most original premise for a book. (At times, the plot felt quite similar to films like Vanilla Sky and Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind.) But even if similar stories have been told before, Taylor sprinkled heavy references to Borges, Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Freudian psychology, Heaven and Hell, and Descartes' solipsistic brand of philosophy (i.e.: "I think, therefore I am.") into his story, using them as clues that continued to keep me thinking and guessing until the end. In The Amnesiac, Taylor has created something more original and intelligent than your average dimestore mystery novel, while still managing to craft a tale that was a whole lot of fun to read.
After skimming some other reviews of this book, it seems as if many folks didn't like it as much as I did, complaining that the ending wasn't very satisfying and that Taylor was a little heavy-handed with the references to Borges and Freud. And those are complaints that I can certainly understand. The Amnesiac is hardly a perfect novel. However, I thoroughly loved it, warts and all. While reading, I, like James, became a detective - underlining clues, scribbling in the margins, and working the story over in my mind long after finishing it.
In short, I can't remember the last time I had so much fun reading a book. I'm not sure whether or not I fell in love with The Amnesiac, but I certainly thought about it a lot when it wasn't around.
caryart's review against another edition
5.0
So good. Totally engaging, well-written.
This book reminds me of when I would read books as a girl and get totally lost in the stories, captivated by the way the words move from the page into my consciousness, looking forward to the next time I can get back into the world of the author.
This book reminds me of when I would read books as a girl and get totally lost in the stories, captivated by the way the words move from the page into my consciousness, looking forward to the next time I can get back into the world of the author.
alanaleigh's review against another edition
4.0
James Purdew cannot remember a few things. A few years, come to think of it. They seem to have just slipped his mind. And it's not as though he can simply consult his journals to refresh his memory, because the journals for those three years seem to be locked in a small safe that can only be cracked via explosives and he's misplaced the key.
In the first scene of Sam Taylor's The Amnesiac, James is rushing up the stairs to answer a telephone in the Amsterdam flat that he shares with his girlfriend, Ingrid -- and he breaks a bone, which leaves his leg in a cast. It is the day before his thirtieth birthday. After a few weeks of recuperation, their relationship unravels, though not explosively by any means. Ingird leaves to take a job where, if he went with her, he could see his life neatly mapped out for him and James is unwilling to continue along such a clear path. After the break-up, a chance encounter with Ingrid's brother conveys to him the message that Ingrid hopes James can work things out with Anna. The name means virtually nothing to James, but it does give him a flash image of recognition, even if he has no idea who Anna might be. He feels compelled to discover the secret of those missing years -- for really, with such a hole in his memory, he starts to question a good amount of the rest of his memories, too. So James returns to H (an specified university town) in the UK, where he went those missing years occurred. He begins to restore a house owned by an unknown Client, and James becomes convinced that he knew this place during those missing years. Alternately becoming obsessed with rebuilding the house and peeling back the layers of his own past, James becomes a kind of detective, digging up clues to discover what secrets are out there, even if they would best be forgotten.
Oddly (or perhaps fittingly), I cannot remember the recommendation or review that caused me to put The Amnesiac on my short-list of books to read. Book club books and other titles wormed their way into my hands before I could finally reach for it upon my shelf, and without glancing at the back cover to refresh myself of the plot (and I had forgotten most of that, beyond simply that it featured a man trying to discover something about himself that he had forgotten), I started to read.
And I could not put it down.
It's hard to describe this novel, as its appeal wasn't necessarily in the linear story. Indeed, when discussing it with others as I was still reading it, the only thing I would say is that I feared it might collapse, becoming too clever to sustain itself. And while it didn't collapse, I also didn't feel entirely satisfied with its resolution. What I did enjoy, though, was the tone of everything... when things started to spiral out of control, the language kept up as you moved along at breakneck speed, but then slowed with James's (and the reader's) attempt to understand. The details helped this, without beating you over the head with clues (though James himself keeps a box quaintly labeled "CLUES"). And these details, like common initials in a story within the story that James finds under the wallpaper or flashes of what must be memories, are what James and the reader cling to as we move along. The reader is allowed to feel satisfied with guessing when things are a bit fishy and while a handful of instances resulted in my guesses being spot on, there were an equal number of times where I felt the bottom drop as I struggled with a new twist. If you couldn't tell already, reality is a bit of a dodgy concept for James Purdew, but it's certainly interesting. I particularly enjoyed a conversation between James and Philip Larkin, where James calls Larkin out on being dead. The details scattered throughout, too, were great -- shining moments of how imperfect our recognition of details can be and what exactly we choose to recall about scenes.
So the novel might not be perfect, but it's certainly fascinating. I mean, if you were to summarize the simple plot of the novel, it involves a newly-thirty man struggling to understand his past and what it all means. That hardly sounds original, but I'm quite pleased with Taylor's twists on it.
In the first scene of Sam Taylor's The Amnesiac, James is rushing up the stairs to answer a telephone in the Amsterdam flat that he shares with his girlfriend, Ingrid -- and he breaks a bone, which leaves his leg in a cast. It is the day before his thirtieth birthday. After a few weeks of recuperation, their relationship unravels, though not explosively by any means. Ingird leaves to take a job where, if he went with her, he could see his life neatly mapped out for him and James is unwilling to continue along such a clear path. After the break-up, a chance encounter with Ingrid's brother conveys to him the message that Ingrid hopes James can work things out with Anna. The name means virtually nothing to James, but it does give him a flash image of recognition, even if he has no idea who Anna might be. He feels compelled to discover the secret of those missing years -- for really, with such a hole in his memory, he starts to question a good amount of the rest of his memories, too. So James returns to H (an specified university town) in the UK, where he went those missing years occurred. He begins to restore a house owned by an unknown Client, and James becomes convinced that he knew this place during those missing years. Alternately becoming obsessed with rebuilding the house and peeling back the layers of his own past, James becomes a kind of detective, digging up clues to discover what secrets are out there, even if they would best be forgotten.
Oddly (or perhaps fittingly), I cannot remember the recommendation or review that caused me to put The Amnesiac on my short-list of books to read. Book club books and other titles wormed their way into my hands before I could finally reach for it upon my shelf, and without glancing at the back cover to refresh myself of the plot (and I had forgotten most of that, beyond simply that it featured a man trying to discover something about himself that he had forgotten), I started to read.
And I could not put it down.
It's hard to describe this novel, as its appeal wasn't necessarily in the linear story. Indeed, when discussing it with others as I was still reading it, the only thing I would say is that I feared it might collapse, becoming too clever to sustain itself. And while it didn't collapse, I also didn't feel entirely satisfied with its resolution. What I did enjoy, though, was the tone of everything... when things started to spiral out of control, the language kept up as you moved along at breakneck speed, but then slowed with James's (and the reader's) attempt to understand. The details helped this, without beating you over the head with clues (though James himself keeps a box quaintly labeled "CLUES"). And these details, like common initials in a story within the story that James finds under the wallpaper or flashes of what must be memories, are what James and the reader cling to as we move along. The reader is allowed to feel satisfied with guessing when things are a bit fishy and while a handful of instances resulted in my guesses being spot on, there were an equal number of times where I felt the bottom drop as I struggled with a new twist. If you couldn't tell already, reality is a bit of a dodgy concept for James Purdew, but it's certainly interesting. I particularly enjoyed a conversation between James and Philip Larkin, where James calls Larkin out on being dead. The details scattered throughout, too, were great -- shining moments of how imperfect our recognition of details can be and what exactly we choose to recall about scenes.
So the novel might not be perfect, but it's certainly fascinating. I mean, if you were to summarize the simple plot of the novel, it involves a newly-thirty man struggling to understand his past and what it all means. That hardly sounds original, but I'm quite pleased with Taylor's twists on it.
cathyatratedreads's review against another edition
4.0
What a fascinating novel! It kept me guessing throughout what genre it would truly fit and how it would resolve itself. It was thought-provoking in that giant, mind-bending way that keeps you guessing a bit and wondering for a few days after finishing it. I can't write too much detail about the book or how I felt about the ending because it would ruin the surprises for anyone who would read it. I can't even say specifically what genre it would fit most because that would spoil it as well (although part of its beauty is that different readers will come to different conclusions on that). It riffs on memory, on love, on the meaning of life; on fear, hope and guilt. I will be curious to see what Sam Taylor delivers next.
Read my full review, including a rating for content, at RatedReads.com: https://ratedreads.com/the-amnesiac-fiction-book-review/
Read my full review, including a rating for content, at RatedReads.com: https://ratedreads.com/the-amnesiac-fiction-book-review/
misajane79's review
1.0
The only reason I finished this book is because I kept hoping it would somehow make sense in the end. It didn't. Perhaps I missed something. I consider myself a halfway intelligent person, but this book went straight over my head.
I got what Taylor was trying to do--explore memory and time through one person's life (and many variations on that life). Parts of it were pretty good. Most of it wasn't. It was these good parts that kept me going, but by the end, I was really resenting the fact that I felt like I had to finish it even though I wasn't really enjoying it.
And the ending? Well, I almost threw the book across the room. But I just didn't have the energy. Or care enough.
Recommended on Very Short List e-mail
I got what Taylor was trying to do--explore memory and time through one person's life (and many variations on that life). Parts of it were pretty good. Most of it wasn't. It was these good parts that kept me going, but by the end, I was really resenting the fact that I felt like I had to finish it even though I wasn't really enjoying it.
And the ending? Well, I almost threw the book across the room. But I just didn't have the energy. Or care enough.
Recommended on Very Short List e-mail
marthagal's review
5.0
I loved this book. Loved, loved, loved.
The back blurb says something about how it's a murder mystery with no murder, a thriller without car chases, and a sci-fi without aliens. I love all three genres, and I really enjoyed how this book combined them. I had a great time trying to figure out the mystery at the center of the novel - sometimes, even trying to figure out what the mystery itself was.
Taylor writes a lot of things like the below quote, where I just sort of went OH HOLY SHIT, YEAH and then had to stare out the window of the train for five minutes and let it sink in.
"But hope, I can tell you, is an exhausting emotion; perhaps, along with fear, the most exhausting of all. It is like juggling eggs: the hope is the shell, and inside is despair. A single crack and the despair might spill everywhere, stain everything."
I spend a lot of time hoping and a lot of time fearing. I never really thought about how exhausting it is.
He also writes a lot about the different versions of ourselves, how we change as we get older, about the nature of self. I ate all that shit up.
While I loved it, I can totally see how people might be annoyed by a) James, the main character, who sometimes I wanted to scream JUST DO SOMETHING, ALREADY and b) there's a lot of philosophy in this, a lot of weird turns. I ate it up but understand how others might get bored.
The back blurb says something about how it's a murder mystery with no murder, a thriller without car chases, and a sci-fi without aliens. I love all three genres, and I really enjoyed how this book combined them. I had a great time trying to figure out the mystery at the center of the novel - sometimes, even trying to figure out what the mystery itself was.
Taylor writes a lot of things like the below quote, where I just sort of went OH HOLY SHIT, YEAH and then had to stare out the window of the train for five minutes and let it sink in.
"But hope, I can tell you, is an exhausting emotion; perhaps, along with fear, the most exhausting of all. It is like juggling eggs: the hope is the shell, and inside is despair. A single crack and the despair might spill everywhere, stain everything."
I spend a lot of time hoping and a lot of time fearing. I never really thought about how exhausting it is.
He also writes a lot about the different versions of ourselves, how we change as we get older, about the nature of self. I ate all that shit up.
While I loved it, I can totally see how people might be annoyed by a) James, the main character, who sometimes I wanted to scream JUST DO SOMETHING, ALREADY and b) there's a lot of philosophy in this, a lot of weird turns. I ate it up but understand how others might get bored.
lherrou's review
5.0
If you enjoy Borges, you'll enjoy this book. If you haven't read Borges, read some short stories from Labyrinths, and if you enjoy them, read this book. If you don't... well, give The Amnesiac a pass as well.
heather_g's review
1.0
Very disappointed in this book. It had great reviews and I was looking forward to a great story...but it was confusing and not very interesting, unfortunately. And the beginning had promise, the middle was bizarre and had too many loose ends, and the ending came out of no where and made no sense nor did it explain why the story took the reader through so many bizarre scenarios.
just not my cup of tea apparently.
just not my cup of tea apparently.
tearaven's review
4.0
This novel seemed to run hot and cold (well, maybe luke warm) for me. There were parts in which I was incredibly engrossed with, and other sections that seemed to drag on a bit long. Overall it was quite an achievement though because it was definitely NOT a predictable mystery; it made your brain toss and turn and analyze and take at face value and analyze again.
The funny story attached to this book is that I first received a bad copy of the book from Amazon.com. There were pages missing, and other pages in there twice. I thought, given the subject matter at first that it was intentional! It wasn't. However, I did discover that Amazon.com has a really great return policy!
The funny story attached to this book is that I first received a bad copy of the book from Amazon.com. There were pages missing, and other pages in there twice. I thought, given the subject matter at first that it was intentional! It wasn't. However, I did discover that Amazon.com has a really great return policy!
lisagfrederick's review
3.0
I got the feeling, as I read this, that I was supposed to think it was The Coolest Book Ever - impossibly clever, stunningly original, blah blah blah. And for the first two thirds, I was sufficiently dazzled by the tight pacing, crisp prose, ominous overtones, and all of the hairpin twists and turns in the plot. But then it devolves into murky psychology, bizarre scenarios that seem shoehorned in for no good reason, and an ending that's not nearly as much of a shocker as it would like to believe. I'll keep an eye on this author - he shows a lot of promise. But I'm not signing on the dotted line just yet.