Intended Audience: AdultSexual content: MildAce/Genderqueer characters: NoneRating: PG-13 for languageWriting style: 3/5Likable characters: 4/5Plot/Concepts: 4/5A new experiment is being set up in the EU to test how medically-induced comas might benefit the prison system, but first an innocent person must volunteer as the control. J.J. O’Malley needs to spend some time away from his own overactive mind, and three months of unconsciousness via the Somnos project seems like the perfect fit.I picked this book because the premise seemed like science fiction, although it wasn’t advertised as such. I had to do some digging to confirm that it fit the theme, and even though it was very much a story about one person’s mind and life, the science fiction element of the plot is ever-present. Although it is literally a footnote for most of the book, it is a very large footnote, both in terms of actual space on a given page and its place in the mind of the reader.Yes, that’s right—a great deal of this story is told in footnotes which are interspersed throughout the narrative in places which often seem completely unrelated to the actual content of the footnotes. I could almost never tell what the footnote had to do with the sentence it was attached to, and this annoyed me quite a bit, as well as the fact that it took me a couple of chapters to realize each chapter was told from a different point of view (I admit this was partially my fault, since each chapter is clearly labeled with the name of the person who’s telling the story). Let me spare you some grief right now by explaining that the book is set up as if the reader is a journalist or investigator compiling notes on J.J.’s life—thus the sections of narrative from several different people, and the footnotes about the Somnos project. About halfway through the book I managed to get over the footnote issue and accept that it served an atmospheric purpose even if I would have preferred the notes be delegated to separate chapters rather than being constant interruptions.Sometimes it’s difficult to separate writing style and plot execution, or to decide which aspects of both deserve a certain grade. Because the way the story is told—complete with the interrupting footnotes and constantly switching viewpoints—is part of what makes it so haunting, I can’t decide if I love or hate it. I enjoyed the voice of each actual chapter well enough—each of J.J.’s family members and friends were well-fleshed-out and their colloquialisms gave me a raw feeling of immersion in the life of their little Irish town of the modern age. But the footnotes were told from a perspective of being ever-present in some future when these chapters had already happened and the Somnos project was nearly complete. If that wasn’t disorienting enough, the writing style employed there is so vague and abstract that the footnotes gave me very little actual information about the project. Even after finishing the book, I can’t tell you exactly what the Somnos project hoped to accomplish (apart from proving a way to imprison people on a smaller budget), or why J.J.’s brainwave patterns became the most interesting thing on the internet. Maybe the reason for my confusion is that I was waiting for some ulterior motive behind the project to be revealed, and it never was. The project wasn’t the point of the book, but merely one piece of the world interacting with all the other pieces in J.J.’s uniquely tormented consciousness.I have come to the conclusion that this book is mainly about the ways in which public and individual self-consciousness affect us as humans. I thought it would be mostly about how technology has changed that process, but religious or spiritual beliefs and personal experiences play just as much if not more of a role in J.J.’s psychological struggle with identity. The technology aspect is only important insofar as it expands the story beyond J.J.’s mind and—with the watching, obsessive public—questions how we define our own existence and the strangely fragile and indestructible inner forces that make us who we are. Its themes might be particularly relevant to readers who have experienced traumatic losses or mental and emotional health issues. I’m sure I’m not the only one who knows what J.J. means when he says “I want to take my mind off my mind for a while.”Content-wise it is a difficult book, only because it shows the struggles of an isolated soul trapped in its own self-analyzing spiral. Sometimes the same difficult thing can happen to two people—one will walk away from it, and the other will be left crippled. I’ve always wondered why. This book asks difficult questions like that. I’m not sure if it gives any easy answers either. But despite how uncomfortable it was to read, I would still recommend it mainly because it does a good job of showing the human condition for what it is.
You can read more reviews at my blog, The Armchair Librarian!At the risk of sounding like a total bitch, I'm just going to go ahead and point out the obvious pun here: that it is incredibly unfortunate for a realllllly boring book to be called "Notes from a Coma." A cruller person than I might say something like: Notes from a Coma: The Self-Prophesizing Failure.I liked what this book was trying to do. I say that I lot, but I do mean it. Notes from a Coma had the potential to be very interesting. It takes place in a small Irish town. This one Irish bloke decides to adopt so he goes to Romania and purchases an orphan for two thousand quid. IKR.This kid is J.J., and he turns out to be a very precocious, very morbid little boy who tries the patience of pretty much everyone around him. One day he gets into an argument with a friend of his, and the friend ends up over-dosing on alcohol (and there are hints that it might have been suicide, but who the hell knows?).J.J. decides to do the same thing, pretty much: he volunteers for an experiment to put prisoners in medically-induced comas...to keep them docile, I suppose. There are six volunteers, and J.J. is the control! That's right: a one-man control group. What is wrong with this picture? Oh dear oh dear.Okay. So. Speaking as someone who worked in a psychology lab (and this is the soft stuff, screwing with people's emotions--this isn't even touching the brainy gooey parts), this is so, so, so wrong. 1) Control group cannot be one person, and six people isn't an adequate sample size. You wouldn't want someone like J.J. as your control, either: he's so freakishly smart he might have counter-veiling factors in his brain that would make the procedure safer for ordinary people (or the opposite might be true. Science! The aces are wild). 2) You don't test procedures on people. There are rules about that. You have to fiddle with machines in the lab. And then you start with mice and work your way up to more sentient animals, like kittens and puppies and orangutans, with long stages in between involving testing and waiting and lab research and "did you fuck up these animals for life?" inspections/tests on the respective animals' behavior and cognition. 3) The book makes a point of saying that there is a difference between unhappiness and mental illness. Even so, J.J. still wouldn't be a viable candidate because yes, while his grief is within the normal window following grief, writing a suicide-note-like reason for wanting to join the experiment ("I want to make it go away" essentially) with possible intentions of suicide do not make him impartial. Jesus fucking Christ.Things like this really bother me on a personal level, because I have friends afflicted with mood disorders and it is really quite sad, the extent to which mental illness in general is misrepresented in books and movies and TV. My personal ax-to-grind are those horror movies where the big reveal is that scary Mr. Serial Killer has depression/schizophrenia/bipolar disorder and that's why he kills people! No, no, no, no. This book didn't do that, but it did do the other thing I hate, which is have a mentally ill character just to be all cool and hip and edgy and to hell with the facts, dammit!J.J. also wasn't a very realistic little boy. Maybe the author isn't personally acquainted with any little kids, but they don't act like J.J. does. All he does is sit around and stare. Little boys like to play. Even depressed ones. The multiple POV telling was also quite annoying (another pet-peeve of mine), because all the characters sounded the same to me, so I kept getting them mixed up.Eventually, I realized the story wasn't going anywhere I wanted to be privy to, so I decided to stop reading. This book was just too "lit'ry pretentious" for me. You're welcome to it, though!DNF.1 star.
Do You like book Notes From A Coma (2013)?
Notes from a Coma has a good story in its basis, which grabs and moves, but somehow gets lost on the way. The main character, JJ, is a fascinating young man, a thinking man in a world of hard-working, simple folk, who is nevertheless accepted, tolerated and loved by his adopting father and community despite his differences and quirks. He is obsessed by interesting ideas and sometimes acts upon them, even if this takes him over the edge sometimes. His relationship with his friend-brother Owen is beatifully described. You can even get over the very annoying and sometimes intelligible very long footnotes that plague the book, with no added value to the story. The author could've found a better way to enter their contents into the book. You may buy into the whole not-properly-explained decision of JJ's to enter the coma project. What you can't abide for, though, is the fact that this whole mix doesn't really come into fruition, doesn't really mean anything at the end. I'm still not sure what the author wanted us to get from all this, what was the point. Is there any hidden message about the way we are supposed to lead our lives, use our brains? If so, I don't know what it is. Is there another message or meaning? I'd love to know if anyone has gotten it. For me, it was a bit of a disappointment. I was expecting to get more out of this book.
—AdiTurbo
Mike McCormack's Notes From a Coma was first published in the UK by Jonathan Cape in 2005.This newly reprinted edition by American publisher Soho Press has a cover adorned in lavish praise: "The greatest Irish novel of the decade" (Irish Times); "The next step in Irish fiction...visionary" (author David Means); and "The finest book yet from one of Ireland's most singular contemporary writers" (author Matt Bell).Any wonder I was itching to read it?At its simplest level Notes From a Coma is the tale of JJ O'Malley, a Romanian orphan who is adopted by an Irish bachelor and raised in the west of Ireland.JJ's childhood is a happy one, but his life goes off the rails as a young adult when his best friend — and the closest thing he ever has to a brother — dies. Plagued by guilt and grief, JJ decides to do something radical and volunteers for a Government experiment in which prisoners are put into a deep coma and kept on a prison ship.So, while this is a charming, easy-to-read tale about one boy's life in small-town Ireland, it also has a strange science fiction element to it.To read the rest of my review, please visit my blog.
—Kimbofo
Like well-crafted counterpoint, Mike McCormack's Notes from a Coma is made up of independent, yet interdependent, parts. Two parts, in this case. The first is the "beautifully rendered look at small-town Irish life" and the life of JJ O'Malley, told in five voices, each of whom is being interviewed by an unknown person. Here the text flows naturally and comfortably. The second part occurs in the footnotes (which are long, often 4-6 pages!). There lies a deeply cerebral exploration of the history, ethics, and various implications of the Somnos project. It was a challenge to switch back and forth between the easy tone and style of the main text and the difficult passages that make up the footnotes. This duality was certainly a unique way of reading and took some getting used to; it also highlighted McCormack's versatility and skill as a writer.Thinking about the book as a whole, I feel the title "Notes from a Coma" is very poignant. The word "coma" ended up having a deeper meaning than I first considered... I felt the book ended much too soon. What were JJ's experiences during those 3 months? What was the general population privy to that raised the Somnos volunteers to such celebrity status? Brief moments would pique my curiosity, but then never develop. That was a little disappointing. I suppose these things were simply left up to the imagination, but I enjoyed McCormack's writing style so much I wanted to read those details.I did expect more science fiction. Coma patients hooked up and feeding out to the Internet?! That has so many possibilities! It's the type of sci-fi I get excited about reading. But this isn't that type of novel. There are hints of science fiction, but ultimately this is a great work of literary/psychological fiction. It is well worth the read.* I received a copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley. I did not receive any other compensation for this review. *
—Monika
