Misshelved: Review of Same Same, by Peter Mendelsund

I just finished the book Same Same by Peter Mendelsund and I am not sure if I enjoyed it. I bought it because the cover caught my eye and the blurb sounded intriguing:

In the shifting sands of the desert, near an unnamed metropolis, there is an institute where various fellows come to undertake projects of great significance. But when our sort-of hero, Percy Frobisher, arrives, surrounded by the simulated environment of the glass-enclosed dome of the Institute, his mind goes completely blank. When he spills something on his uniform—a major faux pas—he learns about a mysterious shop where you can take something, utter the command “same same,” and receive a replica even better than the original. Imagining a world in which simulacra have as much value as the real—so much so that any distinction between the two vanishes, and even language seeks to reproduce meaning through ever more degraded copies of itself—Peter Mendelsund has crafted a deeply unsettling novel about what it means to exist and to create . . . and a future that may not be far off.
 

So from the blurb it sounds like a magical realism novel about the insufferable world of the people who do TED talks, cool. It’s a thick tome, 483 pages long, and I picked it up because it looked like one of those literary-like books where there would be a lot of words but not much action and because I had been going through a lot of shit in my life (and let’s be real, when am I never going through a lot of shit in my life), I thought it would be a bit of a breather. I guess it delivered, because that’s mostly what it was, but I really wish it was, well, better? Maybe more character focused, having a bit more candy flavor than pure textual flourish to keep me interested because I don’t think I was that invested until I got to maybe the final quarter of the book.

However I find that this book has a major problem. This problem is not anywhere within the covers of the book itself; rather the problem is that this book was shelved in science fiction and fantasy in every bookstore I’ve seen it, and it’s not a science fiction or fantasy book.

( Spoilers Below )