- Audio Cassette
- Publisher: Random House Audio (Feb 1 1994)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0679431160
- ISBN-13: 978-0679431169
- Product Dimensions: 17.8 x 11.2 x 2 cm
- Shipping Weight: 204 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (42 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #2,410,109 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
The Fermata is the most risky of Nicholson Baker's emotional histories. His narrator, Arno Strine, is a 35-year-old office temp who is writing his autobiography. "It's harder than I thought!" he admits. His "Fold-powers" are easier; he can stop the world and use it as his own pleasure ground. Arno uses this gift not for evil or material gain (he would feel guilty about stealing), though he does undress a good number of women and momentarily place them in compromising positions--always, in his view, with respect and love. Anyone who can stop time and refer in self-delight to his "chronanisms" can't be all bad! Like Baker's other books, The Fermata gains little from synopsis. The pleasure is literally in the text. What's memorable is less the sex and the sex toys (including the "Monasticon," in the shape of a monk holding a vibrating manuscript) than Arno's wistful recollections of intimacy: the noise, for instance, of his ex-girlfriend's nail clipper, "which I listened to in bed as some listen to real birdsong."
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
From Publishers Weekly
Baker follows his surprise bestseller, Vox , with a novel once again filled with elaborate sexual fantasies. The "fermata" of the title refers to the fold in time that narrator Arno Strine can induce; this allows him to stop the flow of events around him and proceed in his own fashion to undress unsuspecting women. The 35-year-old Strine, appropriately enough, works as a "temp" in Boston, moving in and out of various office situations, completing his business and then disappearing. Despite his questionable ethics while "in the fold"--fondling women's breasts, going through their pocketbooks, writing erotic marginalia in the books they are browsing, stopping their cars and replacing their music cassettes with ones containing his own pornographic compositions--Strine is blithely confident that, since he means no ill will, he is innocent of any wrongdoing. Despite Baker's vaunted object fetishism, which in all his books registers as an unparalleled gift for description, he once again fails to find a novelistic context that would lend his art any lasting resonance. The sexual escapades here--a lonely woman's fascination with sexual toys strapped to a riding lawnmower; a laboratory investigation of the role masturbation might play in Strine's carpal tunnel problem--border on the ludicrous, however titillating. Still, many Vox readers will flock to this erudite smut even as Baker stalls in his campaign to eventually succeed Updike as America's most polished stylist.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great bookl, but not for the faint of heart.,
By Dalton (Brooklyn, NY United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Fermata (Paperback)
I have to admit that this is my favorite Nicholson Baker book by far. It is positively obscene, so if that bugs you then skip this review and forget about reading the book.To everyone else: this is one of the funniest, weirdest and most endearing books I have ever read. It doesn't have a lot in the way of plot, but the theme and Baker's prose more than make up for it. As a previous reviewer mentioned, Baker has more words for the various parts of the female body than Eskimos have for snow. My favorite is "jamaicas", but I'm not telling what it means. If you like Baker's style (and I would say that this is closer in style to the Mezannine than Vox, minus the footnotes) then there's a lot to like about this book. Highly recommended.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Stop, pause, wait,
By
This review is from: The Fermata (Paperback)
This is probably my favorite book from Nicholson Baker, the modern master of minutiae. Mr. Baker has a gift for capturing the essence of habits, thoughts, reactions, and objects that are so small, so insignificant that most people don't ever notice them ... and yet when Mr. Baker puts them on the page, he gets it just right. None of the half dozen of so books I've read from Mr. Baker sound like much when the plots are summarized, and that is certainly the case with The Fermata. The book's story line is based on the ability of the 35-year-old narrator Arno Strine to somehow stop time, and most of the pages are used up with explorations of how he decides what he can and can't do while time is stopped. The unimpressive story line means that the value of the book depends almost entirely on Mr. Baker's ability to keep the prose engaging. Sometimes it doesn't work (as with his more recent effort Box of Matches) and sometimes it works well, as with The Fermata. As always, what holds it together when it works is Mr. Baker's memory for trivia, his intelligence, and his eye for detail: witness the title: "Fermata," the noun form of the word "stop" in Italian, is also a musical term that means holding a note longer than the time value -- a perfect name for a book with this kind of plot. Ultimately, my criticism of The Fermata is one shared by all of Mr. Baker's books and all literature based on prose rather than memorable plots or characters. In my mind, they're like the old cliché about Chinese food, which tastes great but leaves you hungry a few hours later. In the case of this book, the prose keeps the pages turning, but when you're through, very little of it sticks with you.
3.0 out of 5 stars
not funny, nothing interesting to say,
By
This review is from: The Fermata (Paperback)
Baker came up with a great premise, and a great theme but he just failed to tie everything together nicely. The book is almost totally devoid of humanity, except for a last minute attempt to provide the main charector some. It's hard to be funny when there's no life to your story.That doesn't even go into the fact that Baker seems to have no idea how to write a female charector, i mean i'm male but the way the women in this story acted and reacted was ludicrous. Baker goes off on long tangents frequently which are supposed to be amusing, but they just become tiresome. To see random tangents done right read The Tetherballs of Bougainville by Mark Leyner. Baker doesn't totally grasp what is funny thinking that bizarre sexual fantasies are amusing. I mean they are but only when they are ridiculous not disturbing. I must say though I wish I had this guy's powers, and yeah when I think about it I guess all I would is look at women with their clothes off, but at least my autobiography would be about something...like say a profound life lesson i learned because of my ability. So that my book you know, has a reason to exist.
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