Pfitz

By Andrew Crumey

An 18-th c Prince creates an ideal city on paper which comes to life

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dedalus
• Release date: Apr 22, 2011
• ISBN: 9781907650383

Andrew Crumey

Andrew Crumey was born in Glasgow in 1961. He read theoretical physics and mathematics at St Andrews University and Imperial College in London, before doing post-doctoral research at Leeds University on nonlinear dynamics. After six years as the literary editor at Scotland on Sunday he now combines teaching creative writing at Northumbria University with his writing.He is the author of seven novels: Music, in a Foreign Language (1994), Pfitz (1995), D'Alembert's Principle (1996), Mr Mee (2000, Dedalus edition 2014), Mobius Dick (2004, Dedalus edition 2014) Sputnik Caledonia(2008, Dedalus edition 2015)) and The Secret Knowledge (2013).Andrew Crumey's novels have been translated into 14 languages.

Reviews for Pfitz

[libraryish2 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Is Pfitz the consumate storyteller or a brazen liar? In the end it doesn't matter, because the stories he tells are spellbinding and leave us wanting to know everything. Part love story, part philosophical discussion on planning the perfect city, this book makes you question all the stories you've ever heard. Andrew Crumey takes his usual themes and weaves a brilliant tale.

[thorold_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Borgesian conceit - checkGeneric 18th century setting - checkKafkaesque bureaucracy - checkDiderot dialogue - checkShandean narrative - checkStory within a story within a story - checkBest of all possible Voltaires - checkDeath of author - checkFractals - checkNever-twice-the-same-river - checkFinal scene from Faust - checkWittgenstein - check...in short, this is every cliché of nineties postmodernism crammed into 160 gloriously over-the-top pages. I suspect that Crumey is sending the whole thing up, but with postmodernists you can never quite tell at which point they disappear up their own orifices. At any rate, it doesn't fall into the trap of taking itself too seriously, and Crumey has a light enough touch to allow you to get a bit of fun out of it, even though the fashion for this sort of thing is long gone.

[jackdeighton · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This novel begins somewhat like a fairy tale, “Two centuries ago a Prince…” is pretty close to, “Once upon a time.” However, the characters here do not “live happily ever after” and the philosophical musings the book contains are more elevated than the admonitory morals of the usual fairy tale.The Prince concerned is keen on designing fantasy cities, so much so that whole armies of people are employed to create on paper the perfect city, Rreinstadt - not just the infrastructure but also the doings of its inhabitants and visitors. (This being in the nature of a fairy tale, where the money for this endeavour comes from is not explained.) The first two chapters, which set the novel up, contain no dialogue but manage to intrigue nonetheless.Our hero is Schenk, a Cartographer, poring over maps of Rreinstadt, who on an errand one day is smitten by a pretty young Biographer, Estrella. He is also curious about the partly erased entries on one of his maps, that of the hotel room of a visitor to Rreinstadt, one Count Zelneck. He interprets the names concerned as Pfitz and Spontini. To impress Estrella and give him a reason for continuing to visit the Biography section he invents a story for Pfitz and Count Zelneck and writes it for her. His Pfitz - and therefore ours as we can read Pfitz’s adventures in occasional chapters - is an inveterate story teller in a magic realist kind of way. Spontini turns out to be one of the “authors” of books in Rreinstadt’s library (no detail is too small for the chroniclers of the Prince’s city) whose oeuvre is created by a team of writers. Spontini is apparently destined for madness.So we have tales within tales and characters coming to wonder if they themselves are creations in someone else’s fiction. All very self-referential and post-modern. And, of course, begging a very Science Fictional question as to whether our world is itself a fictional creation or not.Where the treatment began to unravel for me was that events in the “real” world - that of the Prince's city planners - its jealousies and murder attempts, started to mirror the “invented” one (which being cause and which effect, a moot point) This seemed to me to labour the parallels too much. Had I not previously read Crumey’s Mobius Dick, Sputnik Caledonia and Music, in a Foreign Language I might have been more taken with PfITZ. It is still a worthwhile novel; it just doesn’t reach the heights those books did.