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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN num: 9780679725763
ISBN number: 0679725768
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 144
Printing Date: January 16, 1990
Publishing house: Vintage
Release Date: January 16, 1990
Sale Popularity Level: 183925
Studio: Vintage
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
Turns an ordinary ride up an office escalator into a meditation on our relations with familiar objects--shoelaces, straws, and more. Baker's debut novel, and a favorite amongst many of us here.
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
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It's really painful for me to read the fawning praise by other Amazon reviewers lionizing this book for its originality. The entire work could serve as a cliché for artistic pretentiousness at its worst, an exercise in trivial and transparently post-modern intellectual narcissism. Often when you hear an artist's work described as `experimental', it's code for `original but not very good.' This book effectively epitomizes the notion of experimentalism gone awry. Since there is basically no story, we are left with the writing - unremarkable at best - and the ideas, which basically catalogue frivolous lines of thought in which the narrator marvels at the breaking of his shoelaces two days apart, the evolution from milk delivery to cartons, the pleasures of refilling a stapler, and other nonsense. In effect, the author thought it would be clever to hit the reader over the head for 150 pages with life's absurdity. How could this be entertaining? I wondered too and made the mistake of finding out.
I read another reviewer, doubtless agitated by some reference to the book's vapidity, declare that people focus too much on the big questions, when it is really the minutiae that make the difference in our quality of life. I disagree. The reason people differentiate between minutiae and the important is precisely because one is far more relevant to our existence than the other. Maybe there is some nihilistic wisdom in cultivating a jubilant reaction to menial tasks and minor feats of engineering, giving exaggerated meaning and joy to people whose lives are otherwise ordinary and mediocre in every facet, but it's boring as hell to read about.
Rated by buyers -
Imagine describing 3 minutes of minutaie for an entire book. That's Mezzanine. One of my favorites though. A real brain screw.
Rated by buyers -
I enjoyed baker's previous books, VOX and Fermata, but found this book to be completely unreadable and boring.
Rated by buyers 
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I had to read Nichelson Baker for my critical thinking class in 1995 and was undeniably impressed with his book, outside of the classroom. Some have a knack, others have a gift, and Mr Bakers pen has been touched by the comedic hand of god settling him firmly in the later.
From the ergonomics of turn signal devices in japanese cars(they feel like human joints when you activate them) to the bathroom stall noises of public restrooms soundling like soup cans, Mr Baker has a keen zen like perception with the word that puts the reader in distinct focus by using very common settings. His awareness of the world around him and his acute attention to detail lend a lot of credibility to those of us who are fascinated with randomness, the placement of everything, physical objectivity in our personal experiences of the world. One of my favorite writers. The Fermata is very funny too.
Rated by buyers -
There is very little to take away from this book. And that is praiseworthy.
If you feel you must find some kind of meaning, you could make a case that our life is lived in the minutiae that we ignore and not in the grand moments we choose to remember.
Follow a man on his common trip out of a building and across the square. Use this book to fill some idle minutes reading rather than on a sitcom.
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