Apparently the full title is The Great & Calamitous Tale of Johan Thoms: How One Man Scorched the Twentieth Century But Didn’t Mean To. That is a pretty lengthy title. If nothing else, this book might win the award for the longest titled book I’ve ever read.
Sometimes I read a book and from very close to the first page, I know this isn’t a book for me. I know stories come to the author as they come; an author cannot necessarily give his characters or her setting some drastic makeover to appease me, a small-time writer in a distant corner of the internet, still, when it comes right down to it, the best I can say about this book is that it is about a bland man, who has a bunch of bland friends and moves around Europe inoffensively interacting with the local populace, with the exception of one event near the beginning of the novel, when he drives the car in which Archduke Francis Ferndinand is assassinated in. So there’s his bit of exceptionalism, along with almost having beaten a chess master as a child, which, I guess, is supposed to make up for his monotonous personality through out the rest of the novel. Bland plus minutely exceptional still equals dull.
The characterization of the non-Johan characters in this novel is easy to comment upon, in that there isn’t any. Secondary characters have no depth and seem to exist soley to prop Johan up – from his friend Cicero who putters Johan around after Johan starts to lose his mind, to Count Kaunitz who essentially gives Johan an everlasting and infinite amount of money to propel him through the rest of the novel, to his true love Lorelei who decides to be faithful and search forever for her lost love Johan to remind us constantly, basically in every chapter, how extraordinary Johan is, even though there’s no logical reason why she would spend the rest of her life pining over someone who is, essentially, a lump of person with no personality. Lorelei is, essentially, like every other woman in the novel – there to actualize the male. None of the women (Johan’s mother, Lorelei, Cicero’s two wives, Cicero’s daughter, all the nurses Johan encounters) have any purpose or motivation that isn’t intrinsically tied to either Johan or Cicero, neither of whom are compelling enough to merit this; when characters need conventionally attractive sycophants to reassure readers how marvelous the characters are, that’s lazy writing. Plus, I haven’t read such a nurse fixation since Garp:
He was the most grateful recipient of the nurses’ toil and of the generosity of spirit which is unique to their calling, the selfless act of giving care to the injured, sick, and dying … From the nurses and their love, [Johan] extrapolated a theory that explained everything.
And so we get to another part of this book that is not for me: the quirky bits of overwriting. Some people like this. They find it twee and endearing and sort of charming. Me, I sometimes think that we should ban all adjectives, similes, and metaphors, or at least, one should require a license, gained after extensive testing, to use them. For example, this book uses resplendent three times. That is four times more than necessary. One never needs to use resplendent, in the same way I don’t ever need to read
the now rhythmic pentameter of a matured summer storm, finger drumming on the cracked pane behind him
or
Cicero’s smile dislodged osmotic endorphins from within Johan
or
stroppy, ignorant, short-tempered, garlicky, sweaty, stumpy Frenchman
or
The long-term effects of booze intake had permanently loosened his retinal musculature.
Too many words. I will allow however “shitting a sea urchin” to stay. That one was amusing enough.
By the end, maybe in the last fifty pages, Johan sort of grew on me, basically after most of his friends had died and I realized that this wasn’t actually a time-traveling story like I thought it was (based on a off-handed remark of Johan’s in the opening pages:
These things you see here are my vortex, my portal, a wormhole in the space-time continuum, my passage back in time.
Yeah, he meant memory and I totally spaced on that, plus my mind still on the previous book I read, which was about alternate universes). Although, a time traveling story might have made some sense as to why Johan, as a student in 1912, had both Ulysses (published as a book in 1922) and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (published 1928) on his “dustless shelves” and how, while confined in a mental asylum in 1941, Johan was having imaginary discussions about the Marshall Plan (developed 1947, implemented 1948) with Churchill. I also wonder about Johan’s infinite wealth in that in 1914 his wealthy friend put Serbian money in an Austrian bank account for Johan, and with World War One, hyperinflation, the Anschluss and conversion to Reichsmarks, World War Two, and then conversion to what after that – Austrian money? Yugoslavian money? that the initial Serbian money would have stretched out until the end of the novel, sometime in the 2000s. Would it have? I need to find a monetary historian of Europe to ask. But, of course, if he were a time traveler, I assume money would be no object, so he is a time traveler? I don’t know.
Now that I’ve started the train of questions, why was there the framing device where the son is telling the story that his grandfather heard from Johan? That seemed unnecessary. I guess I could suppose it’s also a true story and the author is less of an author and more of a transcriber. But, by now, there’s a lot of stuff I need to be convincing myself to make this novel make sense.
Who should read this book: I started this review by saying this was not a book for me. Ergo, is a book for someone else. Usually when I think of the idea of someone else, what I am really thinking about is my mother. Now, my mother likes to read and I like to read, but we rarely enjoy reading the same thing (obvious exception in that we both love White Teeth, as most people do). But I think my mother would like this book. It’s similar to another book I disliked, The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out The Window And Disappeared, which I gave to my mother because I knew she would enjoy it, and she did. The Great and Calamitous Tale of Johan Thoms is similar in that, other than a suspension of belief, the book asks very little of its reader. Unfortunately, that’s just not my bag.
The Great and Calamitous Tale of Johan Thoms by Ian Thorton went on sale November 21, 2013.
I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace: This was actually Geoff’s book, an 
A Time of Darkness by Sheryl Jordan: This is not a good book. I’m not going to try and convince you that it is, except to say that twelve year old me thought this book was the most mindblowingly amazing book ever written. I was going to name my kids after the characters in the book, and, considering they were named Rocco and Ayoshe, that’s a pretty big commitment right there. Not being very outgoing (and hence not very popular) in middle-school, I would stay in my bedroom and read and re-read this book over and over again. I must have got it from a Scholastic order or the book sale at my school. I still have my copy. Maybe I’ll read it again to marvel at how far my tastes have progressed since tweendom.
The People’s Act of Love by James Meek: I don’t actually own this book. Even though there’s a scene near the beginning that makes me all quesfyefeflj all over (and not necessarily the scene one might expect; mine involves toe nails), I take it out of the library every now and then and think I should really buy it for all the times I’ve read it, but I haven’t yet. When I mention it to people, most think I’m talking about 
Restaurant at the End of The Universe by Douglas Adams: This is my favourite 
Fieldwork by Mischa Berlinksi: This is a library book that I think I just picked up randomly from 
How To Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu: So this is a world-building novel that is sci-fi, but less sci-fi as it’s focus and more sci-fi as that’s the way the story fell; it’s about the people in the sci-fi universe rather than the sci-fi universe itself. It’s another of my You should read this books that only one person has ever taken me up on.
Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason by Helen Fielding: This I got from the discount pile at a Chapters in Waterloo. The sticker’s still on my copy: $5.99. I had a period in 2003 when this was the only book I read. I’d start, finish, then start again. It’s less satirical than the first Bridget Jones but nowhere near as shlocky as the third Bridget Jones. If anything, it can be read as a warning against becoming an unwitting drug mule in Southeast Asia.
Le Petit Prince by Antoine de St-Exupéry: This was one of the first French books that I read all the way through (excepting the abridged-to-seventy-pages books we read in late French Immersion, like Les Misérables abridged to seventy pages, which was quite a feat; Javert didn’t even die in the version we read). I feel sort of silly admitting to how much I like this book, since it’s a book written explicitly to tug at your emotions, but I can’t help it. I like it. I like looking up at the sky and imagining a Prince and his rose on a tiny planet far away.
Adrian Mole: From Minor to Major by Sue Townsend: This I bought in a bookstore in Kingston, Ontario, but I’d read and read and read the first two books in compilation before, having taken them out of the library and surprising my mother, who’d read them and watched the TV series when we were in England. I guess she didn’t think Adrian had made it across the pond. But this bigger Adrian Mole collection, I’ve read it so many times the binding is coming loose and every single page has either had its corner folded down or something spilled or dropped onto it. I suspect I was a bit like Adrian – thinking myself to be intellectual when, in reality, all I was was naive. Case in point: When I went to visit Geoff’s relatives, who, at the time lived near Leicester, I asked them if there was an Adrian Mole statue in Leicester I could go visit. There isn’t. That was an awkward way for me to introduce myself to Geoff’s relatives.
Rules of Engagement by Catherine Bush: This book has a dual – an actual dual with pistols in 1990s Toronto. It’s a pretty quintessential Can-lit novel with characters walking around the leafy Rosedale/ravine-esque parts of Toronto and also ex-patting to London. Apparently (just checking now to see when it was published), I bought it from Amazon on January 1, 2004. I could have sworn I bought a used copy. Perhaps the amazon one was for a gift? I can’t recall. I do know I read a review of the book in a newspaper (The Ottawa Citizen maybe, back when they did book reviews. I don’t think they do anymore) and then thought about it for years before I managed to read it.
