Reviews

At times fun, ambitious, addictive and heartening; this book is also pretentious and a little trying. Its key ‘turning points’ were surprisingly cliche for a book that has such lofty aims and goes big on topics such as family, alienation, neurology and climate change. The contours of its protagonists were sketched out gently; but while there was so much effort put in their strange surroundings and contexts, too little attention was paid to their actual struggles and interrelations. It was fun to travel from London and Berlin to Easter Island, but what did the story gain from its setting in the two European cities? As a foreign reader, I’d have liked to have read more about the Swedish-born and -raised triplets through their toils in and with their homecountry.

eclectic_dodo's review against another edition

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funny hopeful mysterious slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5

This is a very quirky book (I don't necessarily mean that in a good way) and especially by the end it reads like a confusing dream. There are lots of fun, larger than life concepts and some moments of very beautiful writing but it's not really the intimate character exploration which you might expect, especially given the length. I felt like even after 500+ pages I barely knew the characters and I still didn't understand why they did the things they did. HOWEVER you will have fun trying to explain the plot to someone else - it's just that weird.

tamsinwp's review against another edition

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Too wordy in a rather stilted way. Very slow. Didn't like any of the characters.

loveyourlibraries's review against another edition

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emotional slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

eskimonika's review against another edition

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challenging emotional funny informative mysterious reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

ellies_shelf's review against another edition

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3.0

Described as a family saga, A System So Magnificent It Is Blinding is a lengthy novel which ostensibly explores, alongside different types of family and their ensuing relationships, questions of neuroscience and humanity's interconnectedness (on a surface level, it's also preoccupied with the climate crisis). The translation is very strong - it reads as though it were an English original (although helped along somewhat by the abundance of UK references and a lot of the action being set in London).

The three central characters are 26 year old triplets, Sebastian, Clara & Matilda. Nominally, the central mystery of the novel is that one of the triplets was swapped at birth - their mother claims not to know which one of them it was, and their father is 'missing'. Matilda and Clara especially are immediately convinced that they each were the swapped triplet. As the mystery is not hard to solve, as a central conceit this is (perhaps intentionally?) weak. We follow the triplets adrift throughout the larger part of the novel - Sebastian "clinically depressed" and working at an institute for cognitive science in London, Clara on Easter Island living in a colony of climate-crisis end-timers, and the synaesthete Matilda (whose storyline is the least developed) on holiday in Sweden with her partner and his daughter.

After revealing the event which triggered the triplets' separation, Svensson increasingly builds up eerie 'connections' between the three storylines and between past, present and future which hint that there is a 'system' underlying the events of the novel. She relies heavily on secondary characters to do this: Jordan, the 'leader' of the camp where Clara stays on Easter Island; Elif, a former child star Clara also meets there; Jennifer Travis, a cicada-obsessed colleague of Sebastian's; and especially Laura Kadinsky, one of Sebastian's patients at the institute, who enjoys a fairly developed and achingly middle-class secondary storyline.

This is a story which spends a long time strongly suggesting there is going to be an 'Aha!' moment without any payoff. Although the prose and characters are Franzen-esque, Svensson's raided the 'quirky' toolbox for this one - and in a novel where you feel like you should be hunting for connections and noticing foreshadowing, it's hard with all the quirkiness to work out what's meaningful and what isn't. Yet this might be the point? Even so, 500+ pages is a long time to teeter on the edge of farcical implausibility. Only 3 stars for the fact that Svensson is clearly a talented writer and for the excellent, seamless translation; the plot isn't really worth anybody's time.

Final, glaring issue for me (which I really hope is down to my own misreading): there is an incident which I would class as sexual assault, and even if other readers wouldn't, it is definitely an example of complete lack of consent and incredible creepiness. But Svensson, almost implying that the victim overreacted due to their own neuroses, later turns it into a 'kooky', 'awkward' beginning to a love affair...?

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