Misshelved: Review of Same Same, by Peter Mendelsund

[grayestofghosts]

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.

Now, I know there’s a lot of contention for the line between “science fiction and fantasy” versus “literature”. Plenty of people think that books like The Time Traveler’s Wife and Never Let Me Go are misshelved as literature when really they should be science fiction, that shelving these books in literature is somehow declaring that they’re more ‘worthy’ than the ‘trash’ shelved in SFF, that SFF doesn’t truly explore the themes it writes about and is really about aliens and robots and wizards beating each other up while literature is about feelings. Or something. That’s not what’s going on in this book. I mean, yes, it’s trying very hard to be Literature, with a capital L, with the unorthodox formatting and spelling choices and the like but the fact is that in the end there are not any speculative elements in the book.

It doesn’t go full “it was all just a dream of a guy in a mental institution” (though fair warning it does come awfully close), but what is not evident from the blurb or even 2/3 of the way through the book is that this is a work of metafiction. Things that are happening are happening but aren’t really happening. This isn’t magical realism at all, it’s postmodernism, much more symbolic than real, to the point that reality cannot be speculated upon anymore because it is simply not relevant. It is all just text and symbols, nothing speculative at all.

I’m not sure why this book was shelved as science fiction and fantasy instead of literature. Classifications of books in stores are about sales, so maybe someone up top believed this book would sell better as SFF, and who knows, maybe it has. However, I feel that I would have actually enjoyed this book better if it had been sorted as literature, as I think I would have had a better understanding of what I was getting into upon picking it up.