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HomeShop at BookSurgeEducationStudents & Student LifeNikolo Behind the Burning Bush |
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| Customer Reviews: | | Average Customer Review: ( 1 customer reviews )
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Challenging from beginning to end! May 31, 2011
By Falky_Stevie
Part treatise, part novel, this unique masterpiece draws its reader across chronologies, inviting different understandings. As a treatise, it informs the intellect; as a novel, it assaults ones senses, reeling us in received emotions.
The well-honed focus of its satirical style confronts the reader full-force with their own assumptions. Startling puns, whimsical word plays, inverted idioms and upended phrases are what characterise the book. The story draws the reader inexorably to the book's end, as final as a full stop ('period' to non-UKers) or an ink blob, depending on how you look at it. I loved the novel's ending, which presents the two as eternal as Nikolo's image on the outside of knowledge (but I still don't understand how it would work)! "Those who never attempt the absurd never achieve the impossible."
Illustrating Nikolo's adventures is a dizzying melée of vignettes-as-treatise via the exposition of scientific theories and principles versus author-adapted and invented creation myths. Author Rohan Roberts seems to view the latter as primitive attempts at philosophy, science and poetry, inviting us to ask ourselves is whether evidence counts for anything. For example, no one was there to witness the Big Bang. But we can make an analogy between the Big Bang and a murder. When a murder takes place with no witnesses we don't say no one saw it so it didn't happen.
In his progression from animal protégée to beyond philospher-scientist, Nikolo represents a new evolution in humanity. I've never read anything quite like this literary hero, in part Byronic in his contempt of and rebellion against conventional morality with a sceptical mind and a pragmatic bent. Voltaire's Candide is the closest to spring to mind. English literature needs such a hero. Perhaps we all do.
An intelligent, considered, informative and energetically entertaining read!
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