The end of Mr. Y, Scarlett Thomas

The end of Mr. Y is a supposedly cursed book written by Thomas E. Lumas, an obscure nineteenth century British writer. Ariel Manto, who meagerly lives on a monthly column in a magazine and is working on her PhD about thought experiments, unexpectedly finds a copy of it in a second-hand bookshop.

The eponymous book within the book tells the story of Mr. Y who can enter the head of someone else by drinking a mysterious mixture of which he reveals the recipe, passing through a strange space he calls the Troposphere.

And when I'm certain that I understand why the page is important, and the potential reason it was hidden, I sit down and finish the rest of the book, distracted by my own desire to find the ingredients and make up some of this tincture for myself.

Reminiscent of Being John Malkovich, that story goes way deeper into the true meaning of thought power and reality, based on quantum physics and Heisenberg researches.

Actually, some ideas developed in it take a life of their own in the language of the book, or the story itself. Think about the recurrence of the tunnel event, as if the story was already a copy of an original event that was forgotten, hence a copy of a copy without original. Well, I do not want to tell too much here, but that's definitively a book to think about once you have finished it.

Scarlett Thomas is an English author born 1972, who teaches Creative Writing at the University of Kent. The end of Mr. Y (Mariner Books, 2006, 416 pages) is her sixth novel.