BRIEFLY NOTED.(Special Topics in Calamity Physics)(The Whistling Season)(The Wonga Coup)(The Human Voice)(Book review)

Publication: The New Yorker

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COPYRIGHT 2006 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics, by Marisha Pessl (Viking; $25.95). The first hundred pages of this wildly idiosyncratic debut novel are a blizzard of obscure bibliographical references, apocrypha, Capitalized Words of Import, and nouns coerced into being verbs (a pen is not twirled but "triple-lutzed"). If the author seems overexuberant, her pyrotechnics nonetheless suit her narrator, a hyper-literate teen-ager named Blue van Meer, the daughter of a lady-killing professor and (shades of Nabokov) an amateur lepidopterist who died young. Blue chronicles her senior year in high school, when she is Svengalied by...

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