WRITER SOURLY TAKES THE PULSE OF FORLORN LIVES Final Edition

• Published in: The commercial appeal
• Main Author: Stephen Deusner Special to The Commercial Appeal Stephen Deusner is a local freelance writer
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: Memphis, Tenn Gannett Media Corp 26.11.2000
• Subjects: Fischer, Tibor
• ISSN: 0745-4856

Elsewhere, [Tibor Fischer]'s chilly approach interferes with his characters' motivations. He starts Bookcruncher with an enticing premise: The main character is reading every single book in order of publication, starting with the earliest bound editions and working to the most recent best-sellers. At the moment, he's only up to the 18th Century, with its boring adventure tales and pompous religious works like If I Were God. He stows away in bookstores and libraries overnight and has even mastered a trick of reading two tomes at once. Gradually, he begins to see the hopelessness and futility of such a project: "Books," he thinks, "were made of hope, not paper. Hope that someone would read your book; hope that it would change the world or improve it." As the narrator scours shelves for obscure titles, however, he comes to realize that hope is false: Most books never reach a wide audience, and almost all of them are forgotten eventually. It's a heartbreaking but acceptable truth, yet Fischer takes it too far by evoking the cliche that reading is an unfulfilling alternative to experiencing life. In the end, the narrator does confirm this idea; unfortunately, he has to completely break character to do so.