Cover Image: Same Same

Same Same

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I have to be honest on this review. I did find myself feeling very confused on this plot and just could not get into the book. I got about half way through and just was not for me.

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Some novels require work and dedication, whether you're writing them or reading them. Same Same was that kind of novel for me. What do you say about a novel that is as much about writing as it is about creating as it is about the meaningless of trying to do either? Below I have done my very best to gather my scattered thoughts on this novel. Thanks to Knopf Doubleday, Vintage and Netgalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I am going to have to be very honest in this review and admit that for much of Same Same found myself a bit confused. It took me a good few pages to get into Mendelsund's narrative, but once I did I was engrossed by it, despite still being a little lost. Same Same is a novel about creating, with its protagonist Percy Forbisher coming to a desert institute to do exactly that. He is there to create something, if only he knew quite what. Peter Mendelsund says Same Same was largely inspired by Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain, a novel I have not read. As such, I feel like part of the novel may have gone over my head. Same Same is a philosophical novel. It is also a minimalist, mystery and meta novel. Because of this, it is also a rather obscure and difficult novel. It is engaging but also disconcerting. There is a sense of claustrophobia and pointlessness to the novel that makes reading it almost off-putting. In that sense, Same Same is a masterful novel.

Percy is at the institute to create something. That much is clear. All he has, however, after many attempts, are his principles, the bare bones of what he think the work he might create be built around. However, his stay at the Institute has been ruined from day one due to a stain on his uniform. A different Institute member nudges him towards the Same Same shop, which replicates everything perfectly, whether it's a uniform or a device that may or may not be a phone. Percy becomes obsessed with this store, but at the Institute things slowly unravel as paper begins to pile up, creeping into all its corners and bringing the whole thing to a slow and painful halt. And then everything goes to hell and I'm not quite sure how. I still haven't quite figured out what the end is, exactly, or what it is trying to say. And perhaps that is the point. Because in the end Same Same is largely about the emptiness of creation. The industry is led by a Director who does nothing but threateningly shout inspirational slogans and empty words like 'synergy'. He'll remind you of influencers, spin instructors and Apple product releases. He's terrifying and almost gave me nightmares.

Peter Mendelsund presents his readers with a challenge in Same Same. Reading through other reviews I have found many readers struggling with the novel in similar ways at myself. And yet I never once considered putting it aside. Mendelsund perfectly captures the oddities of humanity and the little inconsistencies in our world that make it so interesting. At one point he mentions how "the nicely cooled breezes blow in, jellyfishing the curtains" and I had to pause for a minute and accept just how brilliant that description was. Same Same is full of those kind of moments and they were largely what kept me engaged because they grounded the philosophy of the book in how mundane humans are. Same Same is challenging and at times it does feel like Mendelsund is a little bit too indulgent with himself. However, getting through it is rewarding and I can't say Same Same hasn't made me reconsider the way we think of art and creation.

Same Same is complicated and long and indulgent and weird. It is not an easy read, but it is a fascinating vivisection of creation and the artist. This is a book for those looking for a challenge.

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I have to admit that I got about 30% of the way through this book before I chose to DNF it. It's rare for me to DNF but it happens.

I usually like mildly pretentious self-indulgent overly long books that seem to go on forever. Maybe "like" is too generous a word, but I can generally get through them. But I've thrown up the white flag for this one, after trying to repeatedly slog through it. It's definitely not for me.

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"Same Same" is a philosophical study of simulacra, a playful dystopian novel; far-reaching in scope, clever in its composition, it unnerves the reader as much as it entertain.

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2 stars, Metaphorosis Reviews

Summary:

A man is invited to a remote Institute to pursue a research project, and finds it difficult to focus.

Review:

Peter Mendelsund clearly has a great command of language. Unfortunately, he appears to have little to say. Alternatively, his message is intended for a very select group. While Same Same’s prose has style and rhythm, the entirety of the book suggests that it’s a an in joke about publishing for publishing insiders – all allusion and implication, with no substance. That may be deliberate – to the extent the book is about anything, it’s a satirical comment on the triumph of form over substance, of framing over results. What that says about Mendelsund’s view of his day job as a cover designer, I’m not sure.

Overall, the book comes across as self-indulgent, heavy-handed commentary, and yet it’s unclear what it’s commentary on. It’s a high concept novel, but only for those in the know – an elaborate experiment that somehow got published. Even Mendelsund seems to recognize this – his narrator is forever reading an interminable novel that he describes as “torturously long-winded” and “too high minded and complex for me (though its protagonist, strangely, seems to
be a simpleton”. Meta-references aside, Mendelsund seems to have attempted to demonstrate sophistication through a deliberate opacity appealing to as small an audience as possible. While it draws heavily from Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, it doesn’t add anything substantive to the concept.

With great tenacity, I made it about halfway through before I started to skim. Toward the end, the book turns more sharply toward metafiction, but in the end, the exercise struck me as almost completely pointless. I don’t doubt that somewhere, there’s an in-crowd that gets all the references, or that it would be possible to convince ‘sophisticates’ that this is a work of profound depth. It’s not; it is a book about emptiness that is itself empty.


I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

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I cannot work out how to react to this splendidly written but almost self reflexive work. It stumbles along with our protagonist percy as he meets people of the institute who labour on a unifying protect of living well. A local shop introduces ideas of 'simalcra' but percy eventually is barred from going .. he is too enthusiastic.. or so we think. ...the ending approach was long .. and it's a surprise.. I'm not sure I relished this as much as I wanted to.

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Full disclosure: I was provided a free copy of this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review, which I believe I'm providing.

I can barely think of a way to write a review about this book without revealing a massive spoiler. But ahead I plow.

This book takes deeply into the story of Percy, who undertakes a special project in a special place. He is surrounded by a collection of people that provide a background onto which Percy's live to be unfolded, and so for the duration of the book, we occupy Percy's mind as he attempts to complete his work in this background.

This is a complete immersion into Percy's psyche; as the Percy's project proceeds, we experience it entirely from Percy's first-person perception of it - not as an independent viewer listening to a narrative and plot being woven by an author.

And Percy has a unique way of perceiving & processing what is happening around him. He dives deep, wide, and flies all around it while trying to assimilate it. Important elements of information and experience around his project emerge from a special shop - the Same Same - that fixes things that Percy has found awry, often with surprising impact. Pages and pages of paper in this book are spent with us accompanying Percy on his journey of mentally processing the fundaments of his project and the things that emerge from the Same Same.

And here's where I have to figure out whether I actually liked being part of that journey. Percy's walk around the information he must process can become ... tedious. The author - in order for us to truly understand what it's like to be part of Percy's information processing - doesn't hold back on this tedium. A given moment in time can go on for either a single sentence, or for a chapter of flowing, wide-ranging consideration of all the aspects and implications of that moment.

Here's an example of percy, describing Miss 🙂, the Brand Analyst:

"Simple, you'd think. One of these: 🙂. But no, no, she's a forward arrow: →. Or, a fingerpost. Better still, just a finger, pointing; 👉. For the jolly little trendsetter that she is: a disembodied finger. A finger with a pretty little pink nail. Pointer finger. Trigger finger; pew, pew. Digitus secundus. It's perfect actually-- as apical creative and ideation manager at a creative consultancy responsible for branding, systematic trend-watching, scenario development, and visioning. A modern oracle, she is. A roadmapper. A strategic consultant. Sniffs for trends, and then sells forecasts to high-bidding clothing manufacturers, game designers, packaging specialists, fashion conglomerates, entertainment studios, food labs, app developers, and even, ouroboros-like, to other creative foresight consultancies. For a not-insignificant outlay of money she will tell you what that color, that style, that phrase, that cadence, that disposition or humor, that taste will be--the one which will appeal next season, next year, in ten years, as far down the pike as you wanted her to look, all the way to the end of cindered time. Incredibly high success rate: predictions-to-outcomes. Day after day, in her office, diode-lit by three monitors, tabs open, phone lines on speaker, silent feeds us polling, networks and platforms auto-updating, page-view by page-view, analytic by analytic, click after click, vibrating with the hum of cooling fans and brushed by the building's ventilation, peering at now's entrails, its wasted wants, its dissatisfactions and refuse, reading in this..."

The depth to which Percy goes to think through situations increases steadily as the book proceeds. Around halfway through the book, I started to have difficulty being interested the full depth of Percy's reflections. So much so that I started skimming. And skimming faster and faster. I had to ask myself the question "Do I care about Percy's explorations of this next moment?" Too-often, the answer was "No", and I skimmed faster, only occasionally slowing to make sure I didn't lose the plot line.

Which is sad, because the work done by the author here to craft Percy's explorations is monumental. It must have taken an incredible dedication to descend so deeply into what Percy is thinking. A bit of a descent into hell, from my perspective.

At the end, we see the the ultimate completion of Percy's mission. And if the reader - like me - is skimming too-fast by that point, it's possible to miss this. And even when revealed, the completion is so obscured buy Percy's analysis of it that it's almost hard to grok the final outcome.

There's a part of me that says "A good editor might push the author to shorten this book by 25% and make the book more palatable." The other part of me says "It is precisely the tedium that you dislike that makes the book effective; shortening that would reduce its impact." This might be true; but at its current length, I struggled mightily to finish it (actually complaining to my wife about its endlessness), and concluded I had not enjoyed it by the time I was done.

At the end of the day, I think this book will be seen as a masterwork by a particular type of reader - the ones where the point of reading the book is to examine what the author can do given the challenge of writing from Percy's perspective. But people who thrive on narrative, plot, story, interactions between characters, and the structure of a "normal" novel are unlikely to enjoy this. I must say I'm one of those, If I were providing a rating based on this element alone, I would have given this a 1-2 star rating.

OTOH, given the incredible depth the author has plumbed, and the level of intensity of that effort, I'm going to give this three stars out of respect fort the effort. My normal rating rules - https://startupdj.com/book-rating-rules - might demand 4 stars. But, when all is said and done, I didn't *enjoy* this book enough to give it 4 stars.

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I found this book interesting at first, with isolated Institute for artistic colleagues and its self-indulgent elitist Institute and meaningless but portentous discussions about creativity. The Same-Same shop, which repairs everything from a stained uniform to a PDA "device," intrigued me. I thought that when the narrator inadvertently left his notes for his Project at the Same-Same shop, the notes would be changed into a piece so brilliant they changed the world. But from that point, papers -- piles and piles of papers -- started taking over and the story took a seriously demented turn. I thought the narrator was mentally ill, the Institute a psych ward, and all those papers the novels he has cut up and pasted together for his Project. That's not at all what the description of the book says, though. I think my version fits the text better. If that's true, the book is way, way too long with its word-salad, several-pages-long sentences. The point could have been gotten across without wading through endless verbiage.

The one moment I felt a connection with the narrator came at the very end, when he looks in a mirror and realizes he is old. That doesn't justify the length of the book, as it is perfectly feasible to portray the passage of time more succinctly, but it was poignant.

I would have liked to learn at some point exactly what the narrator's mental illness was.

Verdict: perfectly competent prose, a deep understanding of institutional manipulation and reality distortion, but ultimately unsatisfying.

The usual disclaimer: I received a review copy of this book, but no one bribed me to say anything in particular about it.

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This is going to be a short review, because I’m not sure I can truly give do it justice without rereading the book. Same, same was absolutely everything I hoped it would be. It was bizarre in all the right ways, and hit just so close to home on creativity, and putting everything you have into a project—more over the pressure that comes from doing so. Percy’s voice is expertly crafted, entertaining and off-putting. His ruminations are fascinating and bizarre in the same breath, devolving into stranger and stranger things throughout the book. Particularly interesting are the other characters in the book, they’re what you would imagine from a group of people who have willingly secluded themselves in the desert to work on their passion-projects—bizarre, passionate and interesting. I have never seen someone capture so perfectly what it’s like to be a writer on the page, and I’m certain this is a book that I’m going to reread multiple times.

Anyway, I would recommend this book to anyone who loves bizarre speculative fiction, who doesn’t mind an unreliable (and sometimes absurd) narrator, and needs just a little bit of surrealism in their life. But, I’m going to say this, this is a book I recommend savoring.

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I'm assuming that if you're reading this review, you've already read the blurb for the book. I won't recap the plot except to say that it starts like a hundred other sci-fi titles: our protagonist goes to some mysterious facility in the near future and has to figure out why he's there and what he's to do. I tried really hard to make it to the end but I finally had to give up at 37%. This is looooong and sloooooooow; nothing happens until 25% when he finally goes to the Same Same store. If there is a metastory about novels, I'm not getting it. He has a fluid style but doesn't say anything with it. Too bad.

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Huh. This was an interesting read once I figured out what it was: a deeply literary and self-indulgent (in a good way) intellectual exploration of language, art, creativity, genius, and material/intellectual culture in a technological age. Not my typical fare but I ended up really enjoying it. Highly recommend this for artists and academics with interest in art/lit theory, and readers with patience who enjoy slow, ruminative, intelligent, bizarro stories. I found the image of an idealized School of Athens-esque fellowship institute where fellows talk and argue but never seem to get anything done darkly humorous and true to life. Mendelsund does some really interesting things with language (the use of internet slang/acronyms and non-Latin alphabet symbols) that will prove fascinating for those interested in simulacra and who are prepared to read deeply/thoughtfully.

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Same Same is a book that will divide readers. Upon starting it, I was forcibly reminded of the grand and sprawling works of China Mieville, and other authors that force you to double down and really commit to their books. Peter Mendelsund expects his reader to engage with his narrative - this book is not for the dip-in-and-out reader, nor the fan of light fluffy couple of hour reads. Same Same squeezes every drop from its protagonist, and as a reader, you have to do the same.
If you commit, you will find it well worth it. Percy is entering The Institute, to complete a grand project. What the project is, he doesn't know. How he'll do it, he doesn't know. He knows however, he is at the tip top of his game, and the institute is the only place where the very best of their fields of expertise commingle to create their very own Projects.
However, this is no simple Sci fi quest style novel. It is densely packed with ideas and ruminations (through Percy's eyes) on the nature of creativity and stagnation, on boredom and genius. Percy is determined to complete his magnum opus, and yet finds himself drowning in boredom, constantly idling over grander metaphysical concepts and ideas as he meets with the other fellows at the institute.
We read of cutting edge technologies, a metadome protecting the institute and a dystopian wilderness of heat and sand outside, culminating in Percy's discovery of the Same Same shop, where one can hand in an item and have it returned along with a better-than-new copy in a short time. Is this a technological marvel? A metaphorical allegory? Some sort of magic? It's hard to tell, as Percy, as we read on, is not a reliable narrator. And as his world and his project waxes and wanes, we are forced to question everything we have read before, and try and parse our own sort of sense of it.
A magnificent, if a little densely packed, book of many layers. Particularly enjoyable was the glut of new words - a dictionary app was needed, but I felt my own mind expanding as I read on, trying to make sense of Percy.
Recommended for lovers of big ideas, big books, big words. Some knowledge of more academic ideas will ease your descent into this book.
I very much enjoyed it, even as I was going - 'what the heck? What is going on?"!
Wish I could do four and a half stars, as I think it's a little too clever for its own good and the wordiness may be off-putting to the less magniloquent along us.

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I’m obsessed with the complete strangeness that is Same Same. Imagine a city built in the middle of a desert, populated entirely by people who are SO passionate about their incredibly specific interests that they can barely speak to other people. Now, imagine those people are allowed to spend every minute of the day pursuing their passion projects on someone else’s dime. You’d get a strange crowd to be sure, and it makes for satisfying people watching.

This is an incredibly imaginative microcosm, with narration by a fascinating character. One minute, our protagonist is staring at the horizon, contemplating the meaning of life and any number of deep thoughts. The next, he’s watching a woman whose months-long project is covering her entire body in string and walking around. Thoughts continue to devolve as the book progresses and our protagonist begins to lose himself.

The biggest surprise was the stream of consciousness style of writing, reminiscent of Virginia Woolf. The language becomes unhinged, the diagrams and footnotes more frequent, and it’s as though we are seeing into his strained, panicked mind. The style gives us a raw look at the creative process and the strain it can have on a passionate individual. Freedom to create comes with pressure to produce and the stressors are abundantly clear.

Finally, Mendelsund’s expertise at describing vivid settings is on display, guiding your imagination on diversions through the institute and the neighboring city. The desert is all around, acting as a metaphor for the intellectual stranded in his own mind. Ideas are vast, possible methods are infinite, and each step further into the desert of indecision leads our protagonist closer to losing himself entirely.

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This is a solid, if somewhat disturbing, sci-fi novel written by a very smart author. A bit absurd, it held my attention overall with interesting characters, a fun study of creativity, and a little mystery thrown-in. The author obviously had fun writing it, and I'm prompted to check out his other (future) novels. I really appreciate the advanced copy!!

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If anyone could work out the precise formula for productive creativity would never have to worry about money every again–or for their children, or grandchildren, or great-grandchildren, etc. etc. But one has to wonder, especially after reading Same Same by Peter Mendelsund (or seen Hollywood’s lineup for the last several years), if devising a formula wouldn’t strip the life out of whatever the mass produced artists came up with. In this strange, constantly morphing novel, Percy Frobisher arrives at the Freehold, an experimental artists’ community. Percy arrives with a vague plan to create something and a drug habit. This art makes sense. Subsequent events get distinctly surreal.

As soon as he arrives at Freehold, Percy begins to take stock of his new environment. Freehold is an elaborately landscaped dome in the middle of an unnamed desert. Everything the residents want will be provided, so long as they always wear their uniforms and make progress on their projects. There are poets, various species of artists, data analysts, archaeologists, philosophers, and others, all working on elaborate, highly conceptual work that might only be comprehensible to people with very specialized PhDs. The residents must also attend group sessions, document their progress, and give a Discourse™. In the group sessions and in Percy’s interactions with the other residents, I saw that all of the residents seem to have the same problem. They have gone so deep into their minds that they’ve lost the ability to communicate with others. They also can’t stop digging. One artist, who labels things for their project, noticed that the labels needed labels—a train of though that will clearly lead no where sensible.

As Same Same progresses (unlike the artists at Freehold), disturbing events occur and equally disturbing themes arise. Percy sees a strange attack that no one will talk about. The director and the admins hound Percy for progress. The other residents seem to be sliding further off kilter. Perhaps most unsettling of all is that it all seems terribly futile. Creativity can’t be forced. If anyone tries, they just end up with incomprehensible nonsense. And copying anyone’s method strips the life and soul out of the work.

Just when I thought I was getting the hang of Same Same, events fall even further into chaos. Percy’s drug habit gets worse. The other residents act even more strangely. Freehold starts to collapse under the weight of heat, sand, and curiously purposeful paper. The only way to understand this part, I think, is to read it metaphorically—a strategy that works very well as I started to wonder just how reliable Percy is as a narrator. Anyone who wants to know who Percy really is and what Freehold actually is will have to read Same Same themselves.

Same Same is a challenge to read, but fascinating. It’s definitely the sort of book I would want to read with other English majors because there is so much to pick apart and talk about. It’s got so many layers that I’m sure one reading doesn’t do this book justice. This is one of the smartest books I’ve read in a long time.

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