One of the best books I have EVER read. Dave Eggers can do no wrong.

There are two important twists to this story – twists I can tell you about that won’t be spoilers – and they are what makes this book so good. The first is in the book itself. The second is in the way the book has been published.

The book starts with an affectation that can easily set the reader off the rest of a book. “Everything within takes place after Jack died and before Mom and I drowned…” Shy of Sunset Boulevard, this is almost impossible to pull off. Don’t worry, Eggers has a plan (or eventually got a plan – remember those twists?). The narrator is Will who, with Hand, is traveling around the world in a few days trying to give away $32,000 and then get to Mexico in time for a friend’s wedding. They are trying to find just the right people, and they are struggling for the trip to go the way they want. At the most surface level, the story tells how their plans change, how they adapt, and how they continue. However, the trip itself is really an attempt by Will to address or forget things from the past. We learn that (as is indicated in the introduction) his friend Jack has died. He has also been the victim of a severe beating. His face still healing, he feels he is being stared at or avoided. The trip is (as would be expected) an internal and external exploration. And it is moving along nicely. Will and Hand have there problems, are only slightly likeable, but we have learned to care about them.

Then, about two-thirds of the way through the book, Hand takes over the narration. He is writing after the first publication of the book and is expressing his frustration because, apparently the book it isn’t one hundred per cent true. His revelations cast the entire story in a new framework, and what we thought we were beginning to understand about the people and the story has to be re-evaluated.

Which got me to wondering. There are references to other titles in Hand’s sidetrack. I had already noticed the cover of this paperback edition included a note that the edition included significant changes and additions. Further, the title page indicated the name of the book had been previously retitled as Sacrament. Interesting choice of words – “retitled”. Was this a case of the author building these clues in the actual book – building in the question of which was reality and which was the novel? So I explored more and found that the hard back was issued without the insert from Hand. What had this book been before? And what was it meant to be now?

So an interesting story gets turned on its ear in two different ways. Reading the insert from Hand with the knowledge that Eggers had actually changed the focus of what he had written (and was even confessing through Hand) kept me thinking at two and three different levels throughout the rest of the book.

In the end, the $32,000 is all given away and Will makes it to Mexico on time. But trying to determine which reality exists in this fiction, and re-exploring these characters through each revelation adds a texture and complexity to this book that, one, I do not think could have existed in the original and, two, raises this book to a level above most others. ( )

Slightly disappointed in his fiction after "Heartbreaking Work," but this was still decent. ( )

If you are not yet desensitised, by visual and audio entertainment, to the value of humour in prose narrative, this book will be hilarious. As for me, Velocity was strikingly amusing rather than outright hilarious. There is the occasional picture as well, which serves to compliment the humour. Most of the humour that exists in this book is based around the characters’ strange motivations, which are completely arbitrary and whimsical. Deciding to swing from tree to tree in a Latvian forest is but one strange example.

The characters are in no way stereotypical and neither is the strange plot. Two guys in their late twenties lose a close friend, come into a great deal of money and decide to embark on a week long journey around the world depositing money into the hands of strangers. What follows is a number of strange encounters with many different cultures where social conventions are arbitrarily abandoned and the reader instantly questions the sanity of the two main characters.

A story about Will’s mental struggles and Hand’s social extravagances, Velocity may bring to mind experiences you have had. Much of the dialogue goes on within Will’s head as he struggles to come to terms with his position in the world. This forces the reader to relate to, or at least attempt to understand, Will’s strange motivations to travel the world handing out money he believes he doesn’t deserve.

Eggers’ style is provocative and unconventional, bumpy and always inviting the reader to wonder what on earth he is on about, only to explain 10 or 15 pages later. He employs the bunch-of-words-strung-together-to-make-a-new-word style that is characteristic of the contemporary American authors I have read, which gives the impression that he has a limited vocabulary and annoys me but is a minor detail that has not prevented me from enjoying this whacky tale.

All in all, Velocity is like nothing I have ever read before – which is both good and bad. It is good because it kept me wanting to find out what would happen next. It was bad because some of the ideas within were extremely abstract. I don’t mind abstract but sometimes Eggers went too far. But don’t take my word for it, find out for yourself.

This review was originally published in On Dit, the student newspaper of Adelaide University. ( )

There are a handful of rather beautifully composed sentences and passages in this book. However, it the majority of it reads as a manuscript with potential; lacking an editor's tutelage.The writing, unfortunately, evokes my perception of prototypical "Gen-X" writing: lack of articulation, faux cleverness, and mis-executed ambiguity. ( )