You Shall Know Our Velocity (2002)

Remember those intoxicated days of the the early 2000's financial boom? Positive thinking? Anything was possible? There would always be more money round the corner? Somehow you'd always get by?

Or perhaps you weren't quite feeling it, and scoffed at this stuff like Billy Bragg dismissing a decade of glorious synthpop and silly clothes in one anti-Thatcher tirade. Though, on the basis of cosmic ordering infomercials featuring Noel Edmonds, and Kirsty and Phil's Pickfords porn, who could blame you?

You Shall Know Our Velocity isn't a tale of taking out a 120% mortgage to set up a personal shopping business with your very own branded Smart car, but it's nonetheless possessed by the spirit of that time, as Will and his mate Hand go on a short unplanned world tour to give away $40,000 he earned for unintentionally being featured in an advert.

Random nights out with insalubrious Russians, taping dollars to African donkeys, and other such madcap antics, interspersed with raw ponderings on the death of a friend and the aftermath of trauma almost can't help but sound when described in summary in 2012, like the InstaHipstaMatic polaroid cliche that launched a thousand blogs.

But actually, it's amazing because of the ten-years-ago-or-more unknowing innocence and because no-one can describe dark elated adventure quite like Eggers. There are good writers who can capture the feeling of a time and place in aspic. But Eggers does it in technicolour 3D hypervirtual reality and then adds a weird, yet brilliantly accurate metaphor that, as when the optician finds the perfect lens, makes you see it all differently again. ( )

My brain is still lolling around trying to know what to make of this book. The only other time I have come away from a book and been puzzled about how I feel happened with DBC Pierre`s book Vernon God Little.

In You Shall Know Our Velocity, there were moments of brilliance and also moments of mediocrity, moments I laughed out loud and moments I cringed. The style is certainly original but possibly to the detriment of the overall work.

Personally, I hold Eggers and the rest of the McSweeney`s (or this group of 30 something New York literati) posse - Vendela Vida, Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss, Claire Messud, Jonathan Lethem - in some sort of awesome esteeem and want to love everything they produce. They are an interesting and interested group of people.

I am going to ponder some more and update later. ( )

I really enjoyed Eggers writing style, the flow of the story, and the characters. However, I was left unsatisfied as I strolled through the last pages of the book. I'm not sure what I was wanting, but whatever it was, it was not what he gave me.

The struggle of WAITING when all you really needed was to move is a part of the book that I felt deeply connected with. They had to hustle, they didn't have the capacity to plan, and had to reconcile this with their urgency for movement and purpose. It was a little bit of a paradox that I felt was unresolved by the end of the book, and would have made the book quite powerful if it had been. Eggers writing was beautiful, however, and I would like to read his first book/memoir. ( )

I got too angry when I reached the part around the middle of the book when when it was revealed that the preceding story of one of the characters was made up.
( )

I rarely do this, but I am not finishing this book. I am sorry. The characters are not interesting, they are boring me, maybe I"m getting too old for the way they think and talk, but I don't think so. The backstory of this crazy trip they are on is too opaque and I feel as lost as the characters are themselves.