The Goon Squad

It's almost a rare occasion nowadays where I'm able to be completely amazed by a book. But Jennifer Egan's A Visit From The Goon Squad managed to intrigue me in ways that shifted my gravitational pull on reality, music, and time. I snagged the book out of pure boredom on a sunny afternoon in Ubud and managed to sift through it three times throughout the stay. Only after reaching home that I found out it was a freaking Pulitzer winning novel. The story goes through a dozen characters at different points in their lives, told in various narratives. Unconventional, yes. Interesting, definitely.

There was a girl with an autistic brother obsessed with rhythmic pauses, who wrote about her life in the desert in a PowerPoint diary. There was a man who was never on the online grid - not a page, a profile, a steady number, who eventually became a rockstar for his soulful songs. There was a music publicist who burned a whole ballroom of her most prominent industry guests, who attempted to regain status as a publicist to a genocide dictator. The producer who ate gold flakes to help him feel younger. His punk rock assistant, who fled to Italy in her teens and caught the sun in a circle through her window.

The book is choke full of random bits and pieces of different plots, with a narrative  that manages to create a telescope within a kaleidoscope, like sifting through random cards in a huge deck. The other three books I read during the trip (Freakonomics, non fiction, interesting in economical content, but lacking in clarity; an unoriginal, unimaginative new London version of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream; and another book about a small fictional town that for the life of me I can't recall its title) didn't manage to hook me in nearly as much as this. Gratifyingly enough, Goons has a pdf version online for the flash reader (link). And I think it's best read when you're in for a unprecendented ride through literature.