The Uninvited by Liz Jensen
My rating: 5/5 cats
so super-psyched that i was able to get a netgalley pre-u.s release of this book. not that many of you care, because so few people read liz jensen. which is, i think, the cause of most of the world’s ills. floundering economy? probably because not enough people are reading liz jensen. hurricane sandy?? happened ‘cuz not enough people have read liz jensen. rihanna and katy perry are fighting?? all of this could have been avoided by just one or two more of you reading some liz jensen. so get out there and take back the world. go ahead and start with this book, because it is pretty sweet.
and i mean “sweet” in the darkest and most horrifying definition of the word. this book centers around hesketh lock, whose asperger’s syndrome prevents him from making emotional attachments to the people in his life, but makes him very good at his job as an anthropologist, employed to discover patterns of behavior across populations.
‘When it comes to gauging human behaviour, it’s an asset. It’s like colour-blind people being deployed by the military to detect camouflage,’ I reply. ‘They look for the shapes rather than the colours.’
and he is very good at pattern-recognition. also numbers, colors, and origami. less-good at remembering the faces of women with whom he has had sex, but what does that get you, at the end of the day?
the world is in need of a hesketh to make sense of some disturbing recurring instances of extreme violence: children all over the world are lashing out at their family members, attacking and killing them with no memory of their actions afterward, and unwilling to discuss or even acknowledge the events. concurrently, acts of corporate sabotage are occurring across the globe, whose perpetrators claim to have seen strange things, and shortly thereafter, commit suicide.
how are these phenomena connected? can hasketh, the “robot made of meat” get to the bottom of it with venn diagrams and ozuru?? sure he can, but sometimes the answers are more horrifying than anyone could have anticipated.
this is an incredibly satisfying book, emotionally, intellectually, and philosophically. it is liz jensen at her finest, and i think i am going to go ahead and up this to the full five stars cats. why not?
i am encouraging you to read this.
heed me, please.
there is a little problem with the netgalley edition, though, one in which every word that uses the letter-combinations “ff”, “fi”, or “fl” will just have those letters omitted completely, so it was a little annoying, but you would be surprised at how quickly your reader-eyes adjust to it. and also surprising how many words use these letter combinations. eye-opening all around.
