Love and Other Thought Experiments: Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2020

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Finnegans Wake is a concatenation of puns committed in a dreamlike English that is difficult not to categorize as frustrated and incompetent.

Also, the chapter doesn’t necessarily explore the thought experiment itself but often uses ideas from that experiment to trigger the next phase of the story. You do not need to have known the thought experiment to follow the book – as each is concisely explained at the start of the chapter. If I had read another twenty pages things would have been clearer and I would have finished the first time. This short novel sounded very much like something I'd enjoy a great deal, unfortunately, it didn't quite meet my expectations. Instead, I settled for doing a few jumping jacks and pacing around the kitchen for a bit until I exhausted myself.Oddly, although the author copiously cites various other authors and literary works that impacted her own writing, she never mentions Lem's Solaris, which would seem to have been an obvious influence there. Eliza wants to believe her partner but, as a scientist, can’t affirm something that doesn’t make sense (“We don’t need to resort to the mystical to describe physical processes,” she says). This becomes a bit more difficult in the final 2 or 3 chapters, which dragged a mite and veered a little bit too much into sci-fi and AI territory for my taste. Written as ten interlinked short stories, the novel starts and ends with love, although it takes a few unexpected turns and alternative storylines in-between the novel's bookends.

There is only one story in the whole bunch that incited any emotional impact for me at all, and it’s the second piece: a child swims out to sea to retrieve a drifting toy for a friend, and worries he won’t make it back to shore; in three mutually exclusive endings, we see him fight for survival. I’m not sure you can be a thought experiment,’ Eliza said, ‘They are supposed to help you think about a problem.I am also becoming impatient with LGBT+ representation that’s simply there and doesn’t add anything to the story – I don’t think it’s wrong to do this, per se, but I really want to read books that think about LGBT+ themes, not books that just add LGBT+ characters. A book that declares, winningly, that just because it's all in your head, it doesn't mean it's not real. Although I am fairly confident I got the gist of the book and figured out many of the philosophical underpinnings . This novel had so much potential, which is why its bizarre unraveling felt like a sort of betrayal, like I had been cheated. Overall, an excellent addition to the Booker longlist and one I will regard as an honorary Goldsmiths shortlistee.

The forking paths reminded me of Borges’ El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan, and the novel as a whole has some similarities. In this regard, it somewhat reminds me of 2013 Booker winner 'The Luminaries', in which the astrological connotations were completely beyond my comprehension, but didn't particularly impede my enjoyment of the story itself].At the same time, it is very different from the kind of book I have come to expect from the Booker (I realised very recently that this is my eighth year of reading the Booker long list, although this year it seems likely I will not read the whole list for the first time in those eight years). Then it was the following scene: he has kissed the English woman to whom he talked in perfect English. I understand and respect the academia of the experiments, but in a number of cases I struggled to get the essence (after looking on line, as I imagine most people who are not philosophers, will need to do).

novel Love and Other Thought Experiments is a confounding and compelling read that I think will have lasting effects on my reading life; exactly how that will play out is still to be discovered. Sophie Ward goes into daring and bold territories, including two non-human narrators and suggestions of alternate realities.Each chapter fits through a philosophical thought experiment which adds a whole new dimension and diversity.