Reviews for On the Edge of Reason

The average rating for On the Edge of Reason based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-02-28 00:00:00 Michael Mcmullen The majority of the people I work with are slaves to this little electronic device that you scan books with. It's called a PDT. The PDT tells you where to shelve the book, and if it does a loud sing-song series of beeps one is supposed to return the book. Most people when they hear that beep they write up a little slip with the return vendors name ASAP and get that book onto a cart to be shipped back. The problem is the PDT has no brain and it's only reacting to a list generated by some faceless entity, or a computer program written by a logical ingrate that doesn't know if a book is selling or not. Store specific sales don't matter to the PDT, it will beep because somewhere it has a file that it connects with that says when ISBN number X is scanned, beep! The book can be selling ten copies a week but the PDT signal the book be gone, and most people go right along with what the little mindless piece of plastic tells them to do. I've been in many battles over the years with people over keeping books that are selling when the PDT tells them return them. These battles are usually waged guerilla style because it's easier to just liberate the books from return carts than to try to explain for the umpteenth time to someone the logic of keeping a book that is selling versus returning it. I've gotten 'talked' to by managers for this. I've had to usurp the attempted returns by managers. I've had to talk other people into not listening to the managers when they say get rid of something. I've had an employee go rat me out to the store manager because I wasn't listening to the PDT and instead kept books based on sales. This is just a small example from my own life of having to deal with certain blind-obedience to illogical dictates but it's tiresome and at times it feels so much easier to just say fuck it, return everything the stupid little machine tells me to and not have to worry about having to fight with someone over trying to do what is best for the store. It would be easier to just say, yup that is the way it should be done it doesn't make any sense to me but in the hierarchical structure of the company those above me must know what is best and if they say to do something I shouldn't even think about it but just do it. This book made me think of other stupid things that go on with the company I work for but I'll keep those things to myself for now. So many stupid things in fact that are mostly the result of a long succession of people just nodding along to idiocy. Not that this book has anything to do with bookselling or corporate retail or anything like that. This book is an absurd look at what happens when an unremarkable middle class man speaks his mind at a dinner party. The man calls a captain of industry an immoral murderer after hearing a story about how the rich man shot four peasants in the back for trying to steal some wine out of his cellar. This breach in decorum reverberates through the town and creates a series of devastating repercussions for the narrator. Previous to speaking his mind about the morality of shooting fleeing men in the back with a rifle and calling the deed heroic he had felt that confines of the groupspeak conformity he lived in to be increasingly stifling; after speaking his mind he sees that what passes for accepted opinions and acceptable decorum is going along with what passes for public opinion without any deviation. The book is an exaggerated extreme about what happens when someone decides to let morality and truth dictate their actions rather than etiquette and decorum but I think that there are lots of little lessons contained in this slim volume and maybe even more fingers pointing that too often doing what is right is ignored because it goes against the grain. I could start listing all the ways that I cowardly and silently just go along with things that I know are wrong, but I'm trying to be less negative about myself in these reviews, so instead I'll just make myself the hero of books and pretend that I'm really a great and virtuous person who always does what is right as opposed to what is easiest, or most accepted. Anyway, On the Edge of Reason is a great, amazing book. I think people should read it, and maybe I should have given it five stars, but it feels more like a four and a half star book. I think I went with four stars because it's so much in the same vein as Thomas Bernhard (although this came I think at least twenty years before Bernhard wrote his first novel) and I think that Bernhard does the first person misanthropic loner against society thing I bit better, but maybe it's just because I had read Bernhard first, and if I had read Krleža (I did that little z thing myself, that wasn't cut and pasted, yo!) first then I would have given this five stars. I want to find more books by this scathing Croatian author! P.S. A quote I meant to include somewhere in the review: Everybody forges signatures on promissory notes, everybody bribes, tells lies, steals and cheats and amasses money, and only the shipwrecked person who were born as righteous men--that is, people whose never have been underminded to such an extent that their vital instincts have been subordinated to their brains--become rags crushed and spat on, because they do not know who to adjust themselves to the animal farm where one single rule is domiant: that the blood let out from the throat of one's neighbor is the warmest and consequently the most nourishing.... You see, I have been crushed. Why? Because I dared to opposed human folly. (ellipses in the text itself)

Review # 2 was written on 2011-09-29 00:00:00 Jeffrey Cheslic Our first-person protagonist is unnamed. He's a Croation lawyer, working for a very politically connected businessman. Drunk at a party he's hosting, the businessman loudly brags about his killing of four men who were trying to break into his cellar to steal a liter of Riesling. Two he shot at the cellar door; the other two at the fence that led to safety. All were shot in the back. The incident happened thirty years before, but the businessman relishes the telling of his killing the four "mad dogs." Our protagonist has a moment of clarity. And yet, he didn't mean to say what he said. He merely thought it, but it came out anyhow, absent-mindedly perhaps, but at the precise moment when the businessman was taking a breath between bombasts. And there it was: it was all a crime, a bloody thing, moral insanity. He's given the chance to retract. But, nuh-uh. Not this time. Krleža skewers government, politics, and, mostly, human nature in what follows. He does so in a way that is accessible, funny, and profound. There's no earthly reason or excuse for not reading this. Remember, our first-person protagonist is unnamed. Who knows, it could be you.