His home life, meanwhile, is no bed of roses either. "When I got home April would always be lying on the couch staring at the TV with the sound off," notes Felix, as he thinks about his wife. "She would just lie there in silence until I came over and asked how she was. The answer was always the same. She was pissed-off, fed-up, and dead sick of it all. The hick town, the constant baby care (of their baby girl Iris), the shopping in sleazy chain stores, the problems with the car, what the neighbor lady had said today, and so on and on.'
Amid this unhappy mix, Felix keeps himself busy by trying to find a solution to Georg Cantor's continuum problem, while experimenting with lucid dreaming and fuzzy weed, i.e. marijuana. After visiting a local bookshop, where he discovers a strange pamphlet about a world called Cimön, Felix experiences an out-of-body experience in which his astral body leaves his physical self. While travelling in the astral realm, he is almost captured by the Devil, only to be saved by Jesus. Felix is then asked by Jesus to take care of a ghost called Kathy, and to bring her to Cimön, where they can merge with God / Absolute Infinity.
While travelling in this astral world, Felix undergoes a surreal set of adventures that includes: transforming into Donald Duck before having his "Duck" heart cut out by an Aztec priest; befriending a giant beetle called Franx that is reminiscent of the bug in Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis; checking into an infinite hotel modeled after the famous mathematical paradox by the renowned mathematician David Hilbert; and meeting such famous thinkers as Albert Einstein and Georg Cantor. Within this surreal landscape the reader is presented with a vision (albeit a very weird one) of the mathematical concepts of transfinite numbers and Cantor's absolute infinity.
This is the third book by Rudy Rucker that I have read and it is the only one that I have enjoyed. Unlike the previous two novels, which can be described as poor parodies of a Salvador Dali painting, the characters in this book are not absurd caricatures, but rather interesting persons. The writing is also infinitely (no pun intended) better that his other works that I have read.
That being said, it is clear that Rucker's instinct is to be the far-out, weird math guy, and as such, this novel does contain the occasional bizarre rant. In fact, by the end of the book, I was starting to worry that Rucker was going to descend into pointless gibberish, like in some of his other books. To my pleasant surprise, however, this book did not become a bad literary version of an acid trip, but rather provided some interesting food for thought about the concept of infinity.
This book is definitely not for everyone, but if you want to read a novel that mixes math with hallucinatory images, then you will find this work interesting.
3 out of 5 stars
