As She Climbed Across the Table, Jonathan Lethem
As She Climbed Across the Table, Jonathan Lethem
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As She Climbed Across the Table

Author: Jonathan Lethem

Narrator: David Aaron Baker

Unabridged: 5 hr 43 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/04/2007

Synopsis

Philip is in love with Alice. As the novel opens, he is beginning to lose her. Not to another man, as he fears, but to, literally, nothing. Alice is a physicist, and a team at the University where both she and Philip work has created a hole, a vacuum, a doorway of nothingness inside the laboratory. They call it "Lack." Alice becomes obsessed with Lack, as Philip is obsessed by Alice.

The novel is at the same time an astute and wise portrait of unrequited love (albeit of a very unusual kind) a hilarious academic parody, a book of ideas and a social satire. It is utterly original, but in the school of Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Katherine Dunn, and David Foster Wallace.

Passion, humor, yearning and knowledge, blended together in a suspenseful love story that could be characterized as "American Magical Realism."

About The Author

Jonathan Lethem is the author of six novels, including The Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn, which won the National Book Critics Award. He is the author of two short story collections and the editor of The Vintage Book of Amnesia. His stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Granta and Harper’s. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and in Maine.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Violet

Lethem’s penchant is always for the dysfunctional, for characters who have at least one screw loose and this is no different. Here he chooses academia to dramatise his vision of our dysfunctional world. Probably no one will ever write a better and more hilarious spoof of academia than Pale Fire but......more

Goodreads review by Ian

Virtual Reality with a Philosophical Bent This is a re-read of one of my favourite novels. I’ve rated it five stars both times, but the rating assumes that you have a philosophical bent. If you don’t, it might come across as hopelessly abstract and removed from any reality that you know. If you do hav......more

Goodreads review by Olethros

-Otra forma de escribir una historia sobre el amor, que no exactamente de amor.- Género. Novela (con un punto de partida fantástico, eso sí). Lo que nos cuenta. En el libro Cuando Alice se subió a la mesa (publicación original: As She Climbed Across the Table, 1997) conocemos a Philip, profesor adjun......more

Goodreads review by MJ

Very clever central conceit – a man loses his lover to a black hole of nothingness – executed stylishly. Lethem has enough tricks up his sleeve to maintain the tongue-in-cheek blend of love story and scientific wankery.......more

Quotes

"Exceptionally clever. . . . A book of compelling ideas, of intellectual conflict, of human frailty and desire. And it's funny."—Dallas Morning News

"Jonathan Lethem has succeeded in delivering a wonderland on the side of the looking glass," —San Francisco Bay Guardian

"Lethem is opening blue sky for American fiction. . . . He is rapidly evolving into his own previously uncataloged species." —Village Voice Literary Supplement

"Wickedly funny." —Columbus DIspatch  

"An oddball tour de force." —Entertainment Weekly 

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