Dec 23, 2009

Mickelsson's Ghosts | Characters/Techniques

Although several reviewers found Gardner's final novel self-indulgent, pretentious, or pedantic, Mickelsson's Ghosts is Gardner's most ambitious and complicated work since The Sunlight Dialogues. Its form appears to be very loose, partly because Gardner employs elements of five distinct sub-genres, and its focus is on the protagonist's preoccupation with philosophers, especially Nietzsche, and his tendency to relate his actual experience with the ideas of the philosophers he has studied.

The five subgenres of fiction working simultaneously in Mickelsson's...