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Equilateral (2013)

by Ken Kalfus(Favorite Author)

3.28 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

1620400065 (ISBN13: 9781620400067)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Bloomsbury USA

review 1: Equilateral was a quirky, pretentious book. I was both delighted and frustrated with the "advanced" vocabulary. I usually like it when an author is more creative with word choice. But, when an author purposely explodes a thesaurus for the sake of being "elite", it can become absurd. That being said, I can see how Kalfus might have intended Equilateral to be a satiric look at the colonial nonsense of the late 19th century. If that was the case, then congrats, brilliantly done ol' chap (I mean that without the even the tiniest hints of sarcasm). Overall, I had quite a lot of fun looking up a couple of new words (favorites being pullulate and tarbush), seeing a few words I've only seen in Shakespeare (ague and dissembling), admiring/mocking how much superfluous description wa... mores bandied about with wild abandon, and so, it was kind of fun and not fun all rolled up into one disconcerting ball of foolscap (ha!).
review 2: Weird. But a good weird. There's much more here than meets the eye, as we are reminded in the text: "everything worth seeing lies at the edge of visibility." On the surface it's a reimagined history, featuring 19th century science, monument building on an heroic scale (the enormous equilateral triangle of the title), and astronomy (said triangle is built to communicate with Mars). It's also an exploration of the other (intellectual and economic other, gender, nationality, even species), and it resonates beyond its surface of bull-headed determination. But it's still weird. 3-1/2 stars. less

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