Special Topics in Calamity Physics
by Marisha Pessl
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Description
A darkly funny coming-of-age novel and a richly plotted suspense tale told through the distinctive voice of its heroine, Blue van Meer. After a childhood moving from one academic outpost to another with her father (a man prone to aphorisms and meteoric affairs), Blue is clever, deadpan, and possessed of a vast lexicon of literary, political, philosophical, and scientific knowledge--and is quite the cinéaste to boot. In her final year of high school at the élite (and unusual) St. Gallway show more School in Stockton, North Carolina, Blue falls in with a charismatic group of friends and their captivating teacher, Hannah Schneider. But when the drowning of one of Hannah's friends and the shocking death of Hannah herself lead to a confluence of mysteries, Blue is left to make sense of it all with only her gimlet-eyed instincts and cultural references to guide--or misguide--her.--From publisher description. show lessTags
Recommendations
Member Recommendations
zhejw I loved both books, but Pessl's is a notch up in language, character development, and plot. Lockhart's is the place for teens to start.
20
samalots Also about a group of elite school friends dealing with a mysterious death in their circle
10
SqueakyChu Both books offer in-detail insights into life as a young adult when interacting with others.
10
sarahemmm This is worth trying if you like the unusual format of Pessl's book.
01
Lillydarlene The intensity of friendship that comes with being in high school, and with being an isolated group, with a dark secret in the background. Both of these are good if you've read The Secret History and are hungry for a similar feel.
SqueakyChu Both books look at issues encountered by one particular student.
34
beyondthefourthwall Families that seem close on the surface but under the surface turn out to have a lot of multilayered mysterious secrets.
Member Reviews
Smart and unexpected, Marisha Pessl’s Special topics in Calamity Physics is unlike any novel I’ve ever read. The narrator is high school student, Blue van Meer, a girl raised by her father, a professor, who constantly moves them around the country, with literature and political science replacing the typical background noise of a car radio. Blue is an intellectual in her own right, an astute observer of the mechanics of the world around her, with understandings uncommon for someone her age.
“A. Boone [the desk clerk at the police station] continued to chew the coffee stirrer and stared at me. He was what Dad commonly called a ‘power distender,’ a person who seized the moment in which he/she possessed a marginal amount of power show more and brutally rationed it so it lasted an unreasonable amount of time.”
Blue becomes involved with a bizarre group of friends, led by an enigmatic and unstable teacher at her newest school. The story involves teen relationships, mystery, social mores, murder and more. This gripping coming of age novel is at times funny and ironic, many times poignant. Each chapter title is named for a piece of literature, and throughout the book there are annotations by Blue, comparing her experiences to various pieces of writing, music and art.
“The girl…nervously bared her long and pointy teeth (see ‘Venus Flytrap,’ North American Flora, Starnes, 1989).”
Relating all of her experiences like a third person observing from a distance, Blue’s unique voice comes out loud and clear. Is the book pretensious? A little. But in Blue van Meer and her father, Pessl has created characters not easily forgotten. show less
“A. Boone [the desk clerk at the police station] continued to chew the coffee stirrer and stared at me. He was what Dad commonly called a ‘power distender,’ a person who seized the moment in which he/she possessed a marginal amount of power show more and brutally rationed it so it lasted an unreasonable amount of time.”
Blue becomes involved with a bizarre group of friends, led by an enigmatic and unstable teacher at her newest school. The story involves teen relationships, mystery, social mores, murder and more. This gripping coming of age novel is at times funny and ironic, many times poignant. Each chapter title is named for a piece of literature, and throughout the book there are annotations by Blue, comparing her experiences to various pieces of writing, music and art.
“The girl…nervously bared her long and pointy teeth (see ‘Venus Flytrap,’ North American Flora, Starnes, 1989).”
Relating all of her experiences like a third person observing from a distance, Blue’s unique voice comes out loud and clear. Is the book pretensious? A little. But in Blue van Meer and her father, Pessl has created characters not easily forgotten. show less
(#39 in the 2007 book challenge)
I tore through it this weekend, I suspect I'm going to need to go back and read it again because even at the time I knew I was going too quickly, but it was that kind of a page-turner. Blue, the daughter of an eccentric professor who won't stay at a college for more than a semester, gets involved with an exclusive-yet-a-little-nuts clique during her senior year at her new prep school. Poor motherless Blue is pulled in about a million different directions by the various strong personalities of the students in the group, not to mention the dramatic and glamorous teacher who is its ringleader. It's one of those books where Incidents happen, and then there is Intrigue and later, Investigation. It's a very, show more very, very good and satisfyingly complex story. Some plot elements are a bit on the absurdist side, and yet they don't take away from the accuracy of the painful cringiness of high school.
Grade: A
Recommended: Very much to people who like intricate plots, high drama, and cautionary tales of Clever People Behaving Badly. show less
I tore through it this weekend, I suspect I'm going to need to go back and read it again because even at the time I knew I was going too quickly, but it was that kind of a page-turner. Blue, the daughter of an eccentric professor who won't stay at a college for more than a semester, gets involved with an exclusive-yet-a-little-nuts clique during her senior year at her new prep school. Poor motherless Blue is pulled in about a million different directions by the various strong personalities of the students in the group, not to mention the dramatic and glamorous teacher who is its ringleader. It's one of those books where Incidents happen, and then there is Intrigue and later, Investigation. It's a very, show more very, very good and satisfyingly complex story. Some plot elements are a bit on the absurdist side, and yet they don't take away from the accuracy of the painful cringiness of high school.
Grade: A
Recommended: Very much to people who like intricate plots, high drama, and cautionary tales of Clever People Behaving Badly. show less
Woo-eee! This book is DENSE, like an old growth forest, and it's tough to see the trees. I would really like to see what's between the author's ears, with this, her first novel at age 27. It is too long by at least 4 chapters, but what starts out as an amusing "oh high school really sucks" tale becomes like a reference book, chock full, actually overflowing, with imaginary references and mysterious characters. Towards the end there's an incredible shock and then so much more comes tumbling after. It is a marvel, but save it for when you are stuck in the house for a number of days - even the swiftest reader must take pause at the beauty and truth of the language. Quote: "I hated when people participated in what Dad called "Sing-along show more Sorrow" ("Everyone's eager to mourn so long as it's not their child who was decapitated in the car accident.")" Absolutely astonishing work. show less
A unique, beautifully written book about that I fell in love with, got frustrated by and ended up being just good friends with.
I've decided that the best way to do justice to a book as long and complex as this one is to start by offering up my overall impressions and then sharing the detail of the experience of reading the book, based on the notes I made as I went along. There are no spoilers.
Overall Impression
"Special Topics In Calamity Physics" is a book with a personality all of its own. Reading it was like meeting a very charismatic person for the first time and being dazzled by their larger-than-life not-afraid-of-anything personal style, seduced by their erudition and left hungry for more of their stories and views on the show more world.
For the first half of this book, I was in love. But it's a very long book, nearly twenty-two hours of audiobook, and, just as with people, long exposure meant that, by the second half, some of the glamour rubbed thin, the erudition began to seem compulsive and irritating and I became hungry for the author to GET ON WITH IT.
By the end of the book, my admiration for it was more considered. I admired the depth of characterisation, the boldness and originality of the idea, the unashamed intellectualism of the delivery and the persistent vein of humour that kept everything human. It was an experience I wouldn't have missed.
On the other hand, I was frustrated that the book seemed to meander rather self-indulgently at times and that the impact of the bold idea was almost lost under the weight of the writing style. I was reminded of an interview with Dennis Hopper where he said that the hardest thing about making "Easy Rider" was knowing which of the perfectly shot scenes to leave out. With "Special Topics In Calamity Physics" nothing was left out.
Then there's the last chapter, "Final Exam". I hope that was humour but it felt more like a sneer.
This book may not be for everyone but I strongly recommend that you give it a try and see if it's to your taste.
My experience reading "Special Topics In Calamity Physics.
If you're interested in reading further, please go HERE show less
I've decided that the best way to do justice to a book as long and complex as this one is to start by offering up my overall impressions and then sharing the detail of the experience of reading the book, based on the notes I made as I went along. There are no spoilers.
Overall Impression
"Special Topics In Calamity Physics" is a book with a personality all of its own. Reading it was like meeting a very charismatic person for the first time and being dazzled by their larger-than-life not-afraid-of-anything personal style, seduced by their erudition and left hungry for more of their stories and views on the show more world.
For the first half of this book, I was in love. But it's a very long book, nearly twenty-two hours of audiobook, and, just as with people, long exposure meant that, by the second half, some of the glamour rubbed thin, the erudition began to seem compulsive and irritating and I became hungry for the author to GET ON WITH IT.
By the end of the book, my admiration for it was more considered. I admired the depth of characterisation, the boldness and originality of the idea, the unashamed intellectualism of the delivery and the persistent vein of humour that kept everything human. It was an experience I wouldn't have missed.
On the other hand, I was frustrated that the book seemed to meander rather self-indulgently at times and that the impact of the bold idea was almost lost under the weight of the writing style. I was reminded of an interview with Dennis Hopper where he said that the hardest thing about making "Easy Rider" was knowing which of the perfectly shot scenes to leave out. With "Special Topics In Calamity Physics" nothing was left out.
Then there's the last chapter, "Final Exam". I hope that was humour but it felt more like a sneer.
This book may not be for everyone but I strongly recommend that you give it a try and see if it's to your taste.
My experience reading "Special Topics In Calamity Physics.
If you're interested in reading further, please go HERE show less
Blue van Meer isn't all that different from other teenage girls, other than she's exceptionally smart and has lived in far too many places for someone so young. Her father, Gareth van Meer, is an eccentric and affably lovable presence in Blue's life, who, as a restless college professor, routinely accepts new job positions all across the country. This is why Blue is so well-traveled, but she adores her father so it's a comfortable arrangement. (Blue's mother passed away a decade before.)
On the cusp of finishing high school but nevertheless starting out anew once again—this time it's at the St. Gallway School in Stockton, North Carolina—Blue falls in with a questionable clique of friends who call themselves the Bluebloods. Through show more them she is introduced to the curious and socially unwieldy Hannah Schneider, a film teacher at the school, whose relationship with the Bluebloods is more like a permissive older sibling than as an authority figure. And, little does Blue know, her life is about to be forever changed.
Unlike most books I finish, persevering through Special Topics in Calamity Physics was a hard-earned effort. Marisha Pessl has composed a complex narrative comprised of nuanced character development, ostentatiously long sentences and a smattering of cultural references, often directly cited, scattered about like sprinkles on a cake. And, I didn't check, are any of the citations made up? A few seem like inside jokes. Some readers may be turned off by the book's overt cleverness, but it grew on me. Like I said, hard-earned. It was as if I could feel my reading skill leveling up after each chapter. By the end, the story coalesced so unexpectedly that I now consider it one of my all-time favorites.
Side note: Randomly, while I was about 2/3rds of the way through, I picked up and skimmed a few pages from another novel. It was an average paperback for the masses, but since I was already heavily immersed in Marisha Pessl's world, the variation in quality between the two was jarring. The difference was like tasting a fine Cabernet Sauvignon vs chugging a grape juice soda. show less
On the cusp of finishing high school but nevertheless starting out anew once again—this time it's at the St. Gallway School in Stockton, North Carolina—Blue falls in with a questionable clique of friends who call themselves the Bluebloods. Through show more them she is introduced to the curious and socially unwieldy Hannah Schneider, a film teacher at the school, whose relationship with the Bluebloods is more like a permissive older sibling than as an authority figure. And, little does Blue know, her life is about to be forever changed.
Unlike most books I finish, persevering through Special Topics in Calamity Physics was a hard-earned effort. Marisha Pessl has composed a complex narrative comprised of nuanced character development, ostentatiously long sentences and a smattering of cultural references, often directly cited, scattered about like sprinkles on a cake. And, I didn't check, are any of the citations made up? A few seem like inside jokes. Some readers may be turned off by the book's overt cleverness, but it grew on me. Like I said, hard-earned. It was as if I could feel my reading skill leveling up after each chapter. By the end, the story coalesced so unexpectedly that I now consider it one of my all-time favorites.
Side note: Randomly, while I was about 2/3rds of the way through, I picked up and skimmed a few pages from another novel. It was an average paperback for the masses, but since I was already heavily immersed in Marisha Pessl's world, the variation in quality between the two was jarring. The difference was like tasting a fine Cabernet Sauvignon vs chugging a grape juice soda. show less
“One should never dribble speculation like a leaky garbage bag.”
I love Pessl’s writing! It is witty, intelligent and imaginative. Despite dark themes of murder, suicide and deception, Pessl humors her reader with her astute narrative and finely crafted plot. This is a brilliantly conceived novel that will make you laugh… and shudder.
I love Pessl’s writing! It is witty, intelligent and imaginative. Despite dark themes of murder, suicide and deception, Pessl humors her reader with her astute narrative and finely crafted plot. This is a brilliantly conceived novel that will make you laugh… and shudder.
I'm sure this is one of those books the ending of which many people would swear that they knew by the second chapter, but this sort of reminded me of The Secret History by Donna Tartt, if it was set in a high school instead of a college. There's a lot of teenaged awkwardness, angst, and cruelty, but it never seemed gratuitous to me.
I enjoyed Special Topics a great deal, and I'm eager to look up the works referenced (those that are real). There's a beautiful balance to it illustrating the subtle, subtle gradation between the colors of wisdom, wit, intelligence, and education, with varying uses of the filters of charm, beauty, loneliness, etc. Acknowledgement of bias doesn't necessarily protect one from it, awareness of the power of show more charm doesn't necessarily keep one from being charmed.
The lack of ultimate resolution is frustrating for me, but I think that's mostly due to the fact that my heaviest influence out of the Western canon is ancient Greek tragedy, in which there are typically punishments for every sin, and some kind of eventual justice. There's very little vindication in Special Topics, but I think part of the point of the story is that vindication is overrated, that knowing the truth is sufficient, and doesn't require being able to prove it to other people.
I'm curious about how I would've felt about the book if I'd read it when I was the same age as Blue Van Meer (impossible, not written at the time), versus how I feel about it now. In my egocentrism, it makes me wonder what precocious teenagers see when they look at us precocious-teenagers-former, what judgment is laid down on us by them. It also makes me wonder, whenever I meet a precocious-teenager-present, which of them are going to make good, and which of them are doomed. show less
I enjoyed Special Topics a great deal, and I'm eager to look up the works referenced (those that are real). There's a beautiful balance to it illustrating the subtle, subtle gradation between the colors of wisdom, wit, intelligence, and education, with varying uses of the filters of charm, beauty, loneliness, etc. Acknowledgement of bias doesn't necessarily protect one from it, awareness of the power of show more charm doesn't necessarily keep one from being charmed.
The lack of ultimate resolution is frustrating for me, but I think that's mostly due to the fact that my heaviest influence out of the Western canon is ancient Greek tragedy, in which there are typically punishments for every sin, and some kind of eventual justice. There's very little vindication in Special Topics, but I think part of the point of the story is that vindication is overrated, that knowing the truth is sufficient, and doesn't require being able to prove it to other people.
I'm curious about how I would've felt about the book if I'd read it when I was the same age as Blue Van Meer (impossible, not written at the time), versus how I feel about it now. In my egocentrism, it makes me wonder what precocious teenagers see when they look at us precocious-teenagers-former, what judgment is laid down on us by them. It also makes me wonder, whenever I meet a precocious-teenager-present, which of them are going to make good, and which of them are doomed. show less
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Her exhilarating synthesis of the classic and the modern, frivolity and fate — “Pnin” meets “The O.C.” — is a poetic act of will. Never mind jealous detractors: virtuosity is its own reward. And this skylarking book will leave readers salivating for more.
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title*
- La physique des catastrophes
- Original title
- Calamity Physics
- Original publication date
- 2006
- People/Characters
- Blue Van Meer; Gareth Van Meer; Hannah Schneider; Nigel Creech; Jade Churchill Whitestone; Milton Black (show all 8); Leulah Jane Maloney; Charles Loren
- Important places
- Stockton, North Carolina, USA; North Carolina, USA
- Related movies
- Special Topics in Calamity Physics (2011 | IMDb)
- Dedication
- For Anne and Nic
- First words
- Dad always said a person must have a magnificent reason for writing out his or her Life Story and expecting anyone to read it.
"Unless your name is something along the lines of Mozart, Matisse, Churchill, or Bond—... (show all)James Bond—you best spend your free time finger painting or playing shuffleboard, for no one, with the exception of your flabby-armed mother with stiff hair and a mashed-potato way of looking at you, will want to hear the particulars of your pitiable existence, which doubtlessly will end as it began—with a wheeze." - Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)By the time we reached the top of the stairs and the Volvo, and the trees crowding the road danced, but only very slightly - they were extras after all, not wanting to distract from the leads - not a new drop of rain had touched me.
- Blurbers
- Franzen, Jonathan ; Shreve, Susan Richards
- Original language
- English
- Canonical DDC/MDS
- 813.6
- Canonical LCC
- PS3616.E825
*Some information comes from Common Knowledge in other languages. Click "Edit" for more information.
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