A review by casparw
A System So Magnificent It Is Blinding by Amanda Svensson

3.0

At times fun, ambitious, addictive and heartening; this book is also pretentious and a little trying. Its key ‘turning points’ were surprisingly cliche for a book that has such lofty aims and goes big on topics such as family, alienation, neurology and climate change. The contours of its protagonists were sketched out gently; but while there was so much effort put in their strange surroundings and contexts, too little attention was paid to their actual struggles and interrelations. It was fun to travel from London and Berlin to Easter Island, but what did the story gain from its setting in the two European cities? As a foreign reader, I’d have liked to have read more about the Swedish-born and -raised triplets through their toils in and with their homecountry.