Hoban's second adult novel is quirky, and huge fun, and examines creativity and death! Read my review on my blog here: https://annabookbel.net/another-weirdly-fabulous-novel-from-russell-hoban ( )

I first read this in 1974 when I was younger. I was so taken with it that it occupied me for a long, long time.

Today I picked it up, outside the temperature was dropping, snow was imminent and I am packing up to move house. I came across this book and sat down in front of the fire and started to read it again. After a few hours I did some more packing then sat down and finished it.

As you can see I've given it 5 stars and it obviously still impresses me no end.

It is a surreal, poetic story about illness, significance, love, sex (1974 sex), mystery and meaning. It is very clever but not enough to piss you off. It is coherently clever. This is one of the books that have put me off writing forever. It introduced me to the deeper meaning of Orpheus and Eurydice and as such I have never forgotten it.

It was an uplifting, naive, experience to read this book and refreshingly so. It is as far from "Gone Girl" and its ilk as you can get. It is a work of imagination where your imagiation will be required to suspend disbelief and mundanity too.

What more can I say? Thank You Mr Hoban



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what a wacky book. I'm amazed I read the whole thing, and I don't know who I could possibly recommend this to. Maybe Yossarian from Catch-22, if he's still alive and uses Goodreads, or whomever this Review has been licensed to. Is it a leap of faith to assume the future caters exclusively to my vanity, or is it a leap of something else?

By the way, where am I, Review asks me? I don't know, I'll let you know when I find you.

Most non-fictional people I imagine would read this and be exhausted by the constant whimsy (or hallucinatory stream of consciousness), allegory (or pretension, or ironic pretension), personification of everything (Everything hates being personified, Personification tells me). I'm exhausted myself.

Then again, though it's not your standard fare, it's not your standard fare, so there's something to be said for that. ( )

What can one say about such a bizarre yet engaging book? It is with some hesitency (sic: prick up your ears, hapless readers of Finnegans Wake; prick up your bottoms, hopeless worshippers of Ulysses) that I make the attempt. Yes, that was me (greetings, Esta) who commented that it was like T. S. Eliot got drunk and decided to write a short comic novel in the style of James Joyce. Let us go then you and I...

Kleinzeit, the central character of the book (he once tells someone jokingly that his name means "hero"), goes to the doctor with a pain in the hypotenuse and is given a hospital appointment. (We overhear the hospital bed calling to him. There is something about a glockenspiel.) He finds a piece of yellow paper (A4) on the ground, takes it to his office, writes on it, and is fired from his job. He finds himself in a ward (A4) full of faintly weird men, and falls in love with the night sister. He is haunted by emotion-wracked pieces of yellow paper. He escapes periodically from the hospital to busk in the Underground with a glockenspiel (Orpheus with his lute), where he meets another man haunted by pieces of paper. He lends him a room, and finds it transformed into what a writer of words on yellow paper needs: a bare room with a deal table. He realizes that he has sprung fully-formed from (somewhere) and has to make an effort to recall (construct?) a past for himself. His medical condition fluctuates, expanding to encompass his diapason, and even his asymptotes (Hoban raids the dictionary for amusing mock-medical terms).

The narrative is fractured, humorous, abounding in wordplay and allusions, partly stream-of-(un)consciousness though narrated in the third person, punctuated by imaginary dialogues with inanimate or personified objects, of which the most important are Hospital and a simian figure of Death. I have had to start reading it again: I don't think it makes sense on one straight reading, as although the plot is (apparently) linear, the writing is circular, and the first-time reader inevitably misses early allusions which hark forward to later chapters (did I mention the glockenspiel?). There are some great one-liners and comic moments.

So what is Kleinzeit? Small-time? Possibly. Like Joyce's Ulysses, it is a short time (though longer than a day), made up of partly articulated moments. Sometimes it is enjoyable to be slightly bemused by a book. I liked it.

MB 16-iv-2012, rev. 19-iv-2012 ( )

(I have reread this so many times that I almost know it by heart.) "Kleinziet" is a perfect book in that, if you accept its narrator, you will have a wondrous trip.

I recently got this note from a member who is reading it: "It's like T. S. Eliot got drunk and decided to write a short funny book in the style of James Joyce." ( )