Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Did you ever get the feeling you've NEVER been here before? Once upon a time in Los Angeles, an addled psychiatrist named Hector Glasco was vainly trying to treat a jaded celebrity named Hilary, who suffered from a chronic and perhaps potentially fatal case of d j vu-that condition, of course, in which one has the weirdest feeling that one has been here before. The cure, it seemed, was to instill a sense of jamais vu, a mysterious feeling that one has never been here before-not in this world, this life, or the most familiar circumstances. This tale of Hector's quest includes a bizarre secret society, a cut-rate Venice Beach shaman, a demented deconstructionist scholar, and the elderly ladies of The Elmblight, Ohio, Book Club and Sewing Circle, who in the course of reading The Jamais Vu Papers manage to become a part of the story, threatening to disrupt the fabric of reality. Real-life people who agreed to take part in the story include Daniel C. Dennett, Tom Robbins, Fred Alan Wolf, Paul Krassner, Fred Chappell, John Brockman, Mar a De C spedes, Timothy Leary, and Jamake Highwater. The storytelling style has been described as "metafiction," and (by Publishers Weekly) as "Seminally integrating illustrations and text." First published by Harmony Books/Crown in 1991, The Jamais Vu Papers has built a solid following over the years. Eventually, the shortage of recirculating copies drove prices so high that it was clearly time for a new edition. So here again is The Jamais Vu Papers-the entire original book plus a bonus tale and some words about the origins of the whole idea.