 First US edition | |
| Author | Marisha Pessl |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | Murder mysterynovel |
| Publisher | Viking Press |
Publication date | 2006 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Media type | Print (Hardback &Paperback) |
| Pages | 519 |
| ISBN | 0-670-03777-X |
| OCLC | 62755674 |
| 813/.6 22 | |
| LC Class | PS3616.E825 S67 2006 |
Special Topics in Calamity Physics (2006) is thedebut novel byAmerican writerMarisha Pessl.
Pessl wrote three drafts of the book, tellingKenyon Review that "each draft took about a year. It wasn’t so much that I was revising Blue’s voice or the language, but that I wanted to make sure the mystery worked perfectly, that all the twists and turns really worked. Writing from the standpoint of anunreliable narrator, you as the author have to know exactly what’s going on at all times. You have to have a really firm handle on what all of the characters are doing, even if your narrator doesn’t understand. That was really the challenge of this book. And it took two or three drafts to figure that out."[1]
The book was first published in August 2006 byViking Press, a division ofPenguin Group, and was a subject of a bidding war that ended in a sale for six figures.[2]
Blue van Meer is a film-obsessed, erudite teenager. She is the daughter of itinerant and arrogant academic Gareth van Meer, who, after the death of his amateurlepidopteran-catching wife (and Blue's mother), never manages to keep his daughter at a high school for more than a semester due to their constant moving from city to city. During Blue's senior year, however, they settle in the sleepy town of Stockton,North Carolina. She starts to attend the St. Gallway School and befriends a group of popular, rich, and mysterious teenagers called the Bluebloods. The Bluebloods are also close friends with the film-studies teacher at St. Gallway, Hannah Schneider, a perplexing woman, who intrigues Blue. After Schneider dies, seemingly by suicide, Blue is left to determine why.
The book is written in the style of the syllabus for an English Literature course and includes references as footnotes. The chapters are named after literary works likeOthello,A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,Wuthering Heights, andWomen in Love.
While the book is replete with literary and cinematic references, some of these references, like "The Way of the Moth" and "One Night Stand" lead to non-existent sources.
The book received many positive reviews and was named one of "The 10 Best Books of 2006" byThe New York Times.
Veronique de Turenne, reporting forNPR, said that Pessl had "a thrilling and fearless voice. A writing career is launched, like it or not, at warp speed."[3]
Some negative reviews, including one inThe Guardian, accused the text of being overly stylized and Pessl of having "a tin ear for prose".[4]
It won the inauguralJohn Sargent, Sr. First Novel Prize in 2006.[5]
In 2007,Variety reported that a movie version was in the works, to be produced byScott Rudin[6] and directed byAnna Boden andRyan Fleck, the writing-directing team behindHalf Nelson, however, as of 2021 the project has never progressed to filming.
