Đang tải dữ liệu
Book of Numbers: A NovelIntroduction of the ebook: Book of Numbers: A Novel
Đánh giá : 2.99 /5 (sao)
A monumental, uproarious, and exuberant novel about the search—for love, truth, and the meaning of Life With The Internet.
The enigmatic billionaire founder of Tetration, the world’s most powerful tech company, hires a failed novelist, Josh Cohen, to ghostwrite his memoirs. The mogul, known as Principal, brings Josh behind the digital veil, tracing the rise of Tet A monumental, uproarious, and exuberant novel about the search—for love, truth, and the meaning of Life With The Internet.
The enigmatic billionaire founder of Tetration, the world’s most powerful tech company, hires a failed novelist, Josh Cohen, to ghostwrite his memoirs. The mogul, known as Principal, brings Josh behind the digital veil, tracing the rise of Tetration, which started in the earliest days of the Internet by revolutionizing the search engine before venturing into smartphones, computers, and the surveillance of American citizens. Principal takes Josh on a mind-bending world tour from Palo Alto to Dubai and beyond, initiating him into the secret pretext of the autobiography project and the life-or-death stakes that surround its publication.
Insider tech exposé, leaked memoir-in-progress, international thriller, family drama, sex comedy, and biblical allegory, Book of Numbers renders the full range of modern experience both online and off. Embodying the Internet in its language, it finds the humanity underlying the virtual.
Featuring one of the most unforgettable characters in contemporary fiction, Book of Numbers is an epic of the digital age, a triumph of a new generation of writers, and one of those rare books that renew the idea of what a novel can do.
Please note that Book of Numbers uses a special pagination system inspired by binary notation: the part number precedes the page number, and is separated from it by a decimal point.
Praise for Book of Numbers
“More impressive than all but a few novels published so far this decade . . . [Joshua] Cohen, all of thirty-four, emerges as a major American writer.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times
“Joshua Cohen is the Great American Novelist. . . . Like Pynchon and Wallace, Cohen can write with tireless virtuosity about absolutely everything. . . . Cohen has turned the tables on the Internet: Instead of being reduced by its omniscience, he forces it to serve his imaginative purposes. . . . If John Henry is going to compete with the steam engine, he needs an almost superhuman energy and intelligence of his own—and if any writer has it, it is Joshua Cohen.”—Tablet
“The next candidate for the Great American Novel . . . David Foster Wallace–level audacious.”—Details
“Frequently hilarious high satire of our digital world . . . a stranger, more layered critique than, say, Dave Eggers’s The Circle—a book after William Gaddis’s heart that will be around well after most summer reads have been recycled (or deleted).”—New York
“[A] monstrous talent and restive, roiling intellect . . . Other recent literary novels have treated the dot-com-mania reboot, its flagship companies, and their ‘disruptive’ technologies—Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge, Dave Eggers’s The Circle—but Cohen’s is the best.”—Bookforum
“Reading Cohen’s magnum opus is a lot like falling down an Internet wormhole. …more
Review ebook Book of Numbers: A Novel
1) None of the people giving this bad reviews here have read the whole book and/or they are incapable of reading serious literature at all (see: the reviewer who confuses the ‘racist’ ideas of characters with the ideas of the author [doing her own bit of quasi-racist thing with a veiled anti-Jewish comment about Brooklyn] OR the other reviewer who complains about being forced to expand her vocabulary).
2) This is an ambitious novel, and it is very good. My bias is to like ambitious books more tha 1) None of the people giving this bad reviews here have read the whole book and/or they are incapable of reading serious literature at all (see: the reviewer who confuses the ‘racist’ ideas of characters with the ideas of the author [doing her own bit of quasi-racist thing with a veiled anti-Jewish comment about Brooklyn] OR the other reviewer who complains about being forced to expand her vocabulary).
2) This is an ambitious novel, and it is very good. My bias is to like ambitious books more than I probably should, out of admiration for the writer aiming high, even if unsuccessfully (see: Norman Mailer). But I don’t think that’s what’s going on here. Cohen aims high and pulls it off. He writes about the contemporary world, which is a lot harder than writing about the past or future, and he manages to do it in a way that isn’t boring or hackneyed.
3) If you read a review of this novel that does not mention the character Moe, know that the reviewer did not actually read the book. Moe is one of the best characters to appear in an American novel in a long time. The post-poker universal remote escapade is just fantastic, but I don’t think I’ve seen it mentioned in a single review.
4) It’s possible that not a single reviewer read the book, even the professional reviewers who wrote positive reviews. One of the tragedies is that the Joshua Cohen is one of the few people capable of reviewing the thing. I hope NYRB runs something thorough.
5) Anyone who cares about contemporary literature, all 5000 of us, should have bought this damn book already. Read it before the new Vollmann comes out at the end of July. …more
Leave a Reply