Post-Confusion

Several loud huzzahs for Neal Stephenson and the latest volume of The Baroque Cycle, The Confusion. A brief precis of the book can be found here, along with a few brief laudatory quotes - though I think the "hacker Hemingway" sobriquet that he got from Newsweek years ago hardly applies to this book, one that owes far more to Henry Fielding (or John Barth in his Sot-Weed mode) than to Hemingway. The book is daunting in its density of detail, as I mentioned in a previous blog, but it certainly packs plenty of narrative punch. I closed the book and felt weirdly disembodied, like I'd been in a trance whilst navigating the reversals of the last 100 pages. Was Quicksilver, the first volume, this good? I remember enjoying it, but not like this - I may have to go back and re-read it (but perhaps I'll save it for the beach later in June).