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The Teleportation Accident (2012)

por Ned Beauman

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7013532,333 (3.58)1 / 73
"In the declining Weimar Republic, Egon Loeser works as a stage designer for New Expressionist theatre. His hero is the greatest set designer of the seventeenth century, Adriano Lavicini, who devised the so-called Teleportation Device for the whisking of actors from one scene to another-a miracle, until the thing malfunctioned, causing numerous deaths and perhaps summoning the devil himself. Apolitical in a dangerous time, sex-driven in a dry spell, Loeser leaves the tired scene in Berlin in pursuit of the lubricious Adele Hitler (no relation), who couldn't care less about him. Heading first to Paris and then to Los Angeles, he finds his entire tired Berlin social circle reconstituted in exile, under the patronage of a crime writer and his possibly philandering wife. He also finds himself uncomfortably close to a string of murders at Caltech, where a physicist, assisted by Adele herself, is trying to develop a device for honest-to-God teleportation.Following his breathtaking debut, Boxer, Beetle, Ned Beauman ups the ante, creating in The Teleportation Accident a marvelous mash-up of historical fiction, L.A. noir, science fiction, and satire, and proving himself a star on the rise"--… (mais)
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 Booker Prize: The Teleportation Accident by Ned Bauman1 por ler / 1kidzdoc, Julho 2012

» Ver também 73 menções

Mostrando 1-5 de 34 (seguinte | mostrar todos)
While there were many laugh-out-loud moments, I just could not muster the energy to finish. I may come back to this one day. ( )
  jbaty | Dec 29, 2023 |
I found The Teleportation Accident a mildly amusing novel, which is not what I expect at the outset. Egon Loeser, a sexually-frustrated wannabe in the 1930s Berlin theatre scene is not an especially promising character for a comedy. What few friends he has are in the process of deserting him, especially after a teleportation device he has constructed for a play injures one of the actors. Ironically, this device was to be used in a play about a 17th Century Frenchman who also tried to make a teleportation device for the theatre, with fatal results.

Beauman drags Egon through a series of excruciating encounters and embarrassments from Berlin, to Paris to Los Angeles as he follows the object of his obsession: Adele Hitler (no relation). The farce of Egon’s life is embellished a series of memorable characters, notably a wealthy sufferer of agnosia, who mistakes pictures of things for reality. Along the way, Egon searches for Adele, his lost book of soft porn and the truth behind the original teleportation accident.

I liked the ending of this book; in fact there are four and the final ending is very cleverly done. I lean between three and four stars for this book, but will give it four due to its originality. ( )
  gjky | Apr 9, 2023 |
I bought this book cheap in a library sale, but I should have left it where it was.

I never found out what the book was about; I hated the author's style, and couldn't get through the book at all.

I advise you not to make the same mistake I did. ( )
  IonaS | Mar 1, 2022 |
This is a very entertaining and absurd story. The mulitiple plot lines are woven together brilliantly. ( )
  grandpahobo | Dec 7, 2021 |
Egon Loeser, protagonist of Ned Beauman’s The Teleportation Accident, is an asshole. He’s obsessed with sex, contemptuous of his friends, hopelessly infatuated with a girl who doesn’t return his affections, and completely untalented as a theatrical director. In the hands of a lesser author, such an unlikable main character could be the fatal flaw that alienates most readers. However, Beauman makes up for Loeser’s bad behavior by populating the novel’s supporting cast with striking, sharply drawn characters and filling it with laugh-out-loud comedy throughout.

At the start of the story, Loeser is a set designer in decadent pre-war Berlin. Loeser’s 1931 is full of never-ending parties, desultory work on a play production that never seems any closer to performance, and an ever-vigilant search for good cocaine. The play he is working on is the story of the life of Adriano Lavicini, a seventeenth-century stage designer best known for the tragic accident that ended his career and life.

Lavicini, it seems, built a complex special effect known as the Teleportation Device which brought down half the walls of a theater and killed two dozen people (and a cat). Loeser, set designer for the play about Lavicini’s life, builds a much more modest Teleportation Device that merely serves to accidentally dislocate the star actor’s arms. Different types of Teleportation Devices are a running theme throughout the play; Lavicini’s, Loeser’s and a literal Teleportation Device built by a Californian professor named Bailey who Loeser meets later.

After the failure of Loeser’s stage device, he heads to yet another Berlin party, where he fortuitously runs into a girl named Adele Hitler (no relation). Loeser was Adele’s tutor when she was younger, and when he discovers the pudgy girl he knew has transformed into an incredibly beautiful young woman, he is instantly smitten. This encounter completely changes the course of Loeser’s life; he becomes obsessed with Adele and follows her first to Paris and then to Los Angeles.

As Loeser fruitlessly follows Adele around the world, he runs into a wonderful cast of characters, all of whom leap off the page. Loeser becomes a fan of the hard-boiled fiction of Stent Mutton and accidentally meets Mutton and his wife one day while wandering lost in California. Dolores Mutton, Stent’s knock-out wife, is beautiful but also incredibly terrifying, later threatening Loeser with death in no uncertain terms. Loeser ends up living in the guest house of one Colonel Gorge, a gruff, powerful man who is suffering agnosia, which causes him to confuse pictures for the real thing – hold up a picture of a woman, and he becomes convinced she is there in the room. The book also includes a few chapters from other perspectives; in one, Beauman focuses on a con artist named Scramsfield, who gets Loeser caught up in one of his scams. In another, Beauman tells the story of the surprisingly unhinged Dr. Bailey, whose fraught personal history has influenced the unconventional means and methods he uses to research teleportation.

Even if The Teleportation Accident occasionally rambled, I was always drawn back in by Beauman’s flair for characterization and comedy. I laughed out loud a good dozen times throughout, which is a rare achievement for any book. The only real criticism I’d level against the book is that the opening pages are needlessly obtuse; I wouldn’t be surprised if a number of readers put it down at the beginning out of a worry that the novel would continue at that pitch throughout. Thankfully, once Beauman settles down and gets to business, The Teleportation Accident is a thoroughly readable and highly enjoyable book. ( )
  unsquare | Feb 16, 2021 |
Mostrando 1-5 de 34 (seguinte | mostrar todos)
Egon Loeser, the sex-starved German stage designer at the heart of this strange and brilliant novel by Ned Beauman, is obsessed with two things. The first is a girl, inauspiciously called Adele Hitler, who he meets in Thirties Berlin, where the book begins. The second is Adriano Lavincini, a late Renaissance Venetian stage-designer who, in 1677, caused part of a Parisian theatre to collapse with his teleportation device – the accident referred to in the title.

Loeser follows Adele from Berlin to Paris and Los Angeles, in the hope that she will eventually sleep with him. On the way, he meets a cast of eccentrics: a caddish Brit, Rupert Rackenham, who seduces Adele and steals the Lavincini story for his novel (and who writes for The Daily Telegraph); a physics professor trying to build his own teleportation device; an Angeleno bookseller who collects science fiction by H P Lovecraft and a con-man in Paris who tries to pass off his own work as an undiscovered novel by F Scott Fitzgerald.

Beauman, whose first novel Boxer, Beetle (2010) interwove the stories of a modern-day collector of Nazi memorabilia with that of a homosexual Jewish boxer in the 1930s, is blisteringly funny, witty and erudite. A series of dazzling metaphors and similes pinpoint an experience exactly: the physics professor, for example, “had that odd conversational manner of some scientists… that is so doggedly awkward that it sometimes seems to verge upon flirtation”. Only once or twice does this style, and off-beam subject matter, strain slightly. For the most part, however, Beauman manages to combine the intrigue of a thriller with the imagery of a comedy. It makes for an excellent read.
adicionada por kidzdoc | editarThe Telegraph, Ellen Hogan (Aug 6, 2012)
 
Living in Berlin just before the second world war, everything goes wrong for Egon Loeser, and it has nothing to do with the Nazis. In Ned Beauman's terrific second novel, longlisted this week for the Booker, his protagonist, a German set designer, is too sex-starved, self-pitying and, usually, hungover to notice that history is happening all around him.

At one point, just before he leaves Berlin to chase a girl named Adele Hitler (no relation), Loeser sees a group of what he thinks are students holding a bonfire outside the library. He assumes it is "some sort of silly art performance" and joins in, cheerfully burning the books of writers he envies. This comes at the end of a section titled Literary Realism – a dig at the one genre that doesn't know it's a genre – after which the book veers gleefully through hardboiled noir, SF, murder-mystery and romance, distorting each in turn.

There is so much pleasure in the unstable elements of the story that I couldn't help feel a loss as the wheels of the plot started to turn. Luckily, the setting up of various false leads, reveals and tricks are worth it for the brilliant finale. If there was ever any worry that he might have crammed all his ideas into his first book, the prize-winning Boxer, Beetle, this makes it clear he kept a secret bunker of his best ones aside.
adicionada por kidzdoc | editarThe Guardian, John Dunthorne (Jul 26, 2012)
 

» Adicionar outros autores

Nome do autorPapelTipo de autorObra?Estado
Ned Beaumanautor principaltodas as ediçõescalculado
Baardman, GerdaTradutorautor secundárioalgumas ediçõesconfirmado
Cárdenas, Juan SebastiánTradutorautor secundárioalgumas ediçõesconfirmado
Detje, RobinTradutorautor secundárioalgumas ediçõesconfirmado
La BocaArtista da capaautor secundárioalgumas ediçõesconfirmado
Mingiardi, VincenzoTradutorautor secundárioalgumas ediçõesconfirmado
Scherpenisse, WimTradutorautor secundárioalgumas ediçõesconfirmado
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"In the declining Weimar Republic, Egon Loeser works as a stage designer for New Expressionist theatre. His hero is the greatest set designer of the seventeenth century, Adriano Lavicini, who devised the so-called Teleportation Device for the whisking of actors from one scene to another-a miracle, until the thing malfunctioned, causing numerous deaths and perhaps summoning the devil himself. Apolitical in a dangerous time, sex-driven in a dry spell, Loeser leaves the tired scene in Berlin in pursuit of the lubricious Adele Hitler (no relation), who couldn't care less about him. Heading first to Paris and then to Los Angeles, he finds his entire tired Berlin social circle reconstituted in exile, under the patronage of a crime writer and his possibly philandering wife. He also finds himself uncomfortably close to a string of murders at Caltech, where a physicist, assisted by Adele herself, is trying to develop a device for honest-to-God teleportation.Following his breathtaking debut, Boxer, Beetle, Ned Beauman ups the ante, creating in The Teleportation Accident a marvelous mash-up of historical fiction, L.A. noir, science fiction, and satire, and proving himself a star on the rise"--

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