The teleportation accident

357 pages

English language

Published Feb. 16, 2013 by Sceptre.

ISBN:
978-0-340-99844-1
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OCLC Number:
822959153

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4 stars (5 reviews)

"In the declining Weimar Republic, Egon Loeser works as a stage designer for New Expressionist theatre. His hero is the greatest set designer of the seventeenth century, Adriano Lavicini, who devised the so-called Teleportation Device for the whisking of actors from one scene to another-a miracle, until the thing malfunctioned, causing numerous deaths and perhaps summoning the devil himself. Apolitical in a dangerous time, sex-driven in a dry spell, Loeser leaves the tired scene in Berlin in pursuit of the lubricious Adele Hitler (no relation), who couldn't care less about him. Heading first to Paris and then to Los Angeles, he finds his entire tired Berlin social circle reconstituted in exile, under the patronage of a crime writer and his possibly philandering wife. He also finds himself uncomfortably close to a string of murders at Caltech, where a physicist, assisted by Adele herself, is trying to develop a device for …

4 editions

Review of 'The Teleportation Accident' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

For me, this is the opposite of The Bourne Identity: I didn't like the first chapter and seriously considered giving up on this book, but after that it grew into something fun and funny. Beauman has fun with adjectives ("bisontine" and "gastropodous" were my favorites) and environmental interaction (I paraphrase: a book jacket asks, "Do you want to know the secret to bedding dames even on Monday?" The character reading the book jacket thinks desperately, "Yes I want to know the secrets to bedding dames even on Monday"). Beauman also writes dismissiveness well (a character doesn't care about a piece of machinery and consequently doesn't ever bother to learn its name, thus when it is referred to from his point of view it is always referred to with a similar - but humorously incorrect - name).

There is a lot going on -- The Teleportation Accident is sort of about …

Review of 'The Teleportation Accident' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

Egon Loeser, protagonist of Ned Beauman’s The Teleportation Accident, is an asshole. He’s obsessed with sex, contemptuous of his friends, hopelessly infatuated with a girl who doesn’t return his affections, and completely untalented as a theatrical director. In the hands of a lesser author, such an unlikable main character could be the fatal flaw that alienates most readers. However, Beauman makes up for Loeser’s bad behavior by populating the novel’s supporting cast with striking, sharply drawn characters and filling it with laugh-out-loud comedy throughout.

At the start of the story, Loeser is a set designer in decadent pre-war Berlin. Loeser’s 1931 is full of never-ending parties, desultory work on a play production that never seems any closer to performance, and an ever-vigilant search for good cocaine. The play he is working on is the story of the life of Adriano Lavicini, a seventeenth-century stage designer best known for the tragic …

avatar for WorzelFG

rated it

4 stars

Subjects

  • Set designers
  • Fiction
  • Teleportation
  • History

Places

  • Germany
  • California