My boyfriend bought me this book, along with Beauman's first novel, Boxer Beetle, which I read first (and enjoyed enough to go straight onto this). I have to say, I highly enjoyed The Teleportation Accident and look forward to reading it again in a year or so! It was funny (in a very dry way, which I love), unique and remarkably well-written. It would have to be, to have such an arsehole of a protagonist.
Loeser is "a total prick", as described in the first paragraph of the book. His main drive throughout the novel is sex, and he ends up following a girl from Berlin to America upon the assumption that the effort he is making doing so will be bound to get her in bed. He spares little interest in his friends left behind to the mercy of the Nazis (at one point tearing up and discarding a letter from a Jewish colleague describing his recent fearful altercation with a Nazi guard), and yet you still feel drawn to follow his story.
This book is often described as a genre-bender, and indeed it is, but also a distortion of time. Although each chapter is set in a specific place and specific time there are small details (such as ketamine being used in Weimar Berlin) that are deliberately used to make the reader feel like time is moving somewhat differently in this novel. Much like The Great Gatsby it makes use of lavish settings of empty people, all trying to impress each other and climb the social ladder. It's anachronistic in this sense, that it could easily be set in the modern day (much like Gatsby, which I can only assumed Baz Luhrman attempted to convey with his hideous film soundtrack - no, I still haven't seen the film), with modern-day party-goers gurning away.
Without giving anything away, trust me when I say the plot twists and turns in bizarre and hilarious ways, reminding me a little of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Don't look into the specifics, just read it.
