You Shall Know Our Velocity! (Updated for Sacrament)

Maggie's parents gave this hardcover edition to me for Christmas, which was pretty exciting. I didn't ask for this book specifically, just books by Dave Eggers, but I'm glad I got this one. I was told there was some addition made to the paperback, I'll have to look into that because I'm told it changes the story quite a bit.

I just finished this, and it was a hard one to put down, unlike Never Let Me Go. I read this in sort of a glum, monotone voice from the narrator, Will. I'm not sure if that was accurate of me, but Will always seems lost in thought and the real world rarely excited him, like he was just an observer, or maybe nothing understood him or his situation.

Eggers made it easy for me to relate to Will, always having conversations with other people or objects in his head. I like the idea of the spontaneous world traveling, though under the circumstances it was rather sad.

Will is struggling with the death of Jack and he thinks that going on this journey will somehow relieve the burden he's carrying. With a beaten face, I think a metaphor for his overall state of mind, him and his friend Hand force encounters with many different people, often prostitutes, to try and push this lump sum he earned off on them.

I don't have the luxury to hand money away, and I would struggle, as they did, with whether it even is right to do so. That aside though, I think it'd be fun to just sort of drop everything and go somewhere though. I haven't been anywhere they went in this book and it sort of makes me want to check those places out. It sounds silly to want to see something the way a fictional character did though.

I guess I don't quite understand the whole mention of Will and his mom dying, I suppose it's beyond me as to how that fits within the context of the story. Perhaps it adds some finality, a feeling of the inevitable. I suppose for Will it may have been a gift, a release, but the way the book ended I'm not sure if that would be the case. I'm sure he would have found it fitting though.

There are numerous good quotes in this book, interesting or similar thoughts and viewpoints on the world. I wish I had marked some of them to remember. I suppose I can try to look some up, but who knows if they'll have the ones I would have wanted to keep. This is definitely worth checking out. I've only read his adaptation, The Wild Things, but I plan on reading more from Eggers. But now I think I'm moving on to Juliet, Naked from Nick Hornsby.

SPOILERS (Discussion of Sacrament)

I read the addition that was released with the paperback edition of this book called Sacrament. I'm glad I read the original version first, but I also question whether that's how Eggers wanted it to be read. Maybe he changed his mind. I don't know. I did enjoy the edition, though I recognize that reading it after the climax would have entirely changed my view of the events in the book and my hindsight might be much different.

I did enjoy the addition. I thought Hand was a great character and it was good to hear from him again. I also like New Zealand, so I enjoyed envisioning him there. I was not upset by any of the falsifications he revealed, and I thought they added their own interesting spin to the plot. It made sense that he was never beaten, though I found this surprising. The whole time in the book, I took his battered face as a metaphor anyway. I was also surprised that his mother had been dead the whole time, but it allowed Jack's real life absence to make sense.

It just seems a little weird that in the Sacrament version, it would become a fictional book about fictionally based events rather than a fictional book about actual events. Sure most of what happened did happen, but some of the major elements were fabricated.

I loved how the ending line was "The pig symbolizes nothing." As it suddenly makes you question the dead pig on the beach symbolized something. You can take it literally and ignore the pig, or you can go back and wonder if the pig was some sort of metaphor for Hand's overcoming the loss of Will. As he starts to write his addendum, he notices it, like maybe he's encountering Will again. Then with the help of a married lady friend, Sonje, he walked down to the drowned pig on the beach to see what it actually was (he thought it was a human body from afar), and the next day it was gone. So, I thought that maybe him writing his part after reading Will's book was his final letting go of his friend, much like Will writing his book may have been him letting go of his mother.

A last thought I had was that there may have been no Hand at all, but it was just Will. Hand did the writing and came clean about things he had lied about. This seems unlikely though, but perhaps Hand was more than a name and less than a person.