Senseless

Rating:
Summary: Captivating, Powerful, and Disturbingly Possible!!!
Review: ...

Hats off to Stona Fitch for his incorporation of so many interesting themes within such a pithy tale. SENSELESS launches you immediately into the action and seamlessly weaves in the back story as both the protagonist and his confusing situation unfolds.

The book is more horrifying in that the story feels tragically familiar, as if it comes out of today's newspaper headlines. Fitch provides painful dimension and humanity to a possible news item we might gloss over while drinking coffee. I read this book days after a videotape of Daniel Pearl's torture and death was delivered to the media.

I often feel that novelists, unlike screen writers, are poorly served by a lack of pressure to condense a story to its essence. SENSELESS had the pacing of a well written, brilliantly edited movie thriller.

Rating:
Summary: Just Read It!
Review: A lot can be said about the intelligence of this book. It looks at popular culture, technology, economic imperialism, terrorism, violence, etc. The book dissects the issues making our world such a dangerous place. Even better, in looking at these things it makes the reader who has finished the book reevaluate what is really important in life. All of this in 160 pages!

But forget all that. Instead, just know that Stona Fitch is a gifted storyteller. He has packed the pages with tension that leaves you wishing you could read faster just to find out what happens next.

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Summary: reaches to depict torture with imagination and originality
Review: Before reading Senseless I didnt have any idea of the plot. The book grips you, and especially in the second half.
There are many creepy twisted books out there, but this one appealed to me, not b/c it was especially creepy, but because of the simplicity, yet, extreme imagination of the story.

Gast (main character) brings you into his world of a new form of torture brought into the world...stealing from him what we all take for granted EVERY DAY. Thus the vivid descriptions let your mind explore the idea of "what if I were in that position?"

Its a great idea for a story and I loved how it was explained.

Rating:
Summary: A meditation on morality
Review: I bought this novel because the author had played in a band I once listened to. But I read it in one day, practically in one sitting, for reasons that had nothing to do with such curiosities.
The novel is horrifying. But to use that word is to do an injustice to its moral ambiguities: it's like thinking that horrors can only exist somewhere else, or at the scene of a really unusual crime. While keeping the action focused on a small apartment in Belgium, Fitch spreads the vision and the implications of his story in two opposite directions. Politically he reveals more and more of the broad vision, the international game that this group is playing with Elliot Gast. Their conspiracy keeps looking bigger - the whole world is involved. And as he spreads out widely in the present world Fitch digs deep into Gast's past, not in cruelty or rushing to judgment but with the fortitude that any morally complex situation requires.
At each step there is more than enough blame to go around, certainly enough blame to make the reader wonder what kind of redemption there can be. And as I read the book Fitch's answer is: "Well, a little." In those terms the final scene is an astonishment. It resolves the story of Gast's imprisonment, but with a new queasy moral ambiguity to go with the resolution.
Is this a "political" book? It is morally meditative in ways that political novels often are not. It might even make you think of another novel in which featureless white objects come to be loaded with meaning after meaning; in which a man resembling a pirate tries to take out revenge on the whole world; in which a lonely consciousness winds up containing terrors it can't even decipher. I'm not saying that Senseless reads like Moby-Dick or will necessarily remind you of Moby-Dick. I am saying that Stona Fitch writes in Melville's tradition of looking for something you'd call goodness in the world and wondering where to find it.

Rating:
Summary: Not worth the suffering
Review: I like "dark" art - "King Lear", "Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia", and so on. And this book is artfully written, no question. But it literally nauseated me and I don't think it was worth it. I mean if I'm going to suffer in encountering a work of art, I expect to receive a commensurate amount of insight. Look past Fitch's state-of-the-art atrocity exhibition and what does he really have to tell us? That political fanaticism is a dead end? That technology has the potential to dehumanize us? This is not exactly a hot breaking news flash.

It's rare that a failed book can do anything worse than waste your time and/or money. This one has permanently sullied a small corner of my mind. Ugh.

Rating:
Summary: Harrowing, elegant, shocking and smart
Review: I picked up Senseless on a Saturday morning, ran some errands, came home and cracked it open, just to read the first couple pages. For the next few hours I white-knuckled my way through this stunningly original, utterly terrifying and yet beautifully written novel. I was reminded of Damage, by Josephine Hart and Ian Mcewan at his finest. The prose is surgical-steel clean, and just as sharp. Yet it is not the sheer suspense or unfathomable evil that makes this book so powerful, but rather the humanity and vulnerability of the central character who is so realistically drawn that I felt I knew him. Senseless is astonishing.

Rating:
Summary: Don't know about 'Orwellian,' but certainly great.
Review: Not to focus too much on the Book Description (see above), but to call this novel "Orwellian" misses the point, I think. Certainly a publisher can't be blamed for trying to characterize its books in accessible terms. But having read the bound galleys of "Senseless," I can say that it's far removed from Orwell on at least a couple of counts--and all the more astounding for that.

First of all, the universe that protagonist Eliott Gast inhabits is no totalitarian superstate, but rather a recognizable--if extreme--version of our own world. Granted, Gast finds himself in horrifying circumstances that have some of the schematic feel of, say, "1984." But in the novel's apparent focus on global capitalism and the latter-day culture of "reality-based" entertainment and instantaneous information-transfer, Stona Fitch addresses a thoroughly contemporary set of concerns that even Orwell didn't quite anticipate.

And in any case, "Senseless" is not "about" these subjects, exactly--or at least not in the way in which "1984" and "Animal Farm" were most definitely about the nightmares of 20th-Century totalitarianism. In the face of his intractably painful, terrifying, and ultimately numbing predicament, Eliott Gast finds himself slipping further and further into a sort of meditative reflection on his past--and particularly on the joys and deceptions of his sense-saturated life before captivity. Rather than offer a simple cautionary tale on the Orwellian mold, Fitch would have his audience consider the personal foundations of a globalized reality: this seemingly universal society that is in fact based on the interconnectedness of billions of individual appetites, in which the individual is as vulerable to the appetites of others as he is responsible for his own.

To say that "Senseless" is both hard to read and hard to stop reading is the highest compliment I can offer it, and one it richly deserves. As with the most compelling "reality show" yet unimagined, you want to know what will happen next--even as you suspect that the answer will horrify. But if the action is at times wince-making, the writing never is: Great writing never is, and that's what the author offers here. Great writing, in a great, unforgettable, and singular work of art.

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Summary: Great Choice for Book Groups'You'll Want to Discuss This One
Review: Senseless is a riveting, one-sitting novel that takes an unsparing look at the escalating role of sensationalism in today's global culture. Although I read the novel before the World Trade Center tragedy, I am more convinced than ever that this tightly-written study of terrorism is relevant and even instructive. Its tough view of the motivation and execution of a horrifying crime might have seemed exaggerated last year; today it feels ominously possible.
Without giving anything away, I'd like to add that the power and hope of the book come into a thrilling focus on the final page. First lines in literature are plentiful, but it's a rare book that closes as effectively as Senseless. The final sentences fire your mind and urge you to rethink the entire novel.

Rating:
Summary: Sweat it out
Review: This literary novel engages the mind as it assaults the senses. It leads the reader to a political situation that has become far too real, and uses a clever plot and chilling details to push us from a comfortable, open-minded perspective, into a world filled with pain and extremes. While the superficial resistance one might have in reading this book would be an aversion to the descriptions of physical pain, what is far more difficult to accept is the powerful social commentary which deepens this book, as it commands us to explore our own psychology and the contradictions with which we live.

Rating:
Summary: 20/20 Foresight
Review: Years before hopelessly outgunned militants battling the world's last superpower fought back with mpegs of beheadings, the online horrors of captivity and torture were detailed by Stona Fitch in the novel Senseless. Fitch's prescient book captures the asymmetrical warfare of the Information Age in the grueling narration of Eliot Gast, an American economist abducted abroad and terrorized by an anti-globalization sect seeking international attention through his suffering. Beyond the trappings of our era, Senseless succeeds as a struggle of a rational mind against irrational circumstances that recalls Poe's best work, and as a taut thriller that is as unrelenting for the reader as for Gast himself. The violence is, as others have noted, positively horrific, yet still familiar and even compelling, because this scenario is just too plausible. Indeed, as Fitch predicted, it's impossible to escape.