Thrown

Resumen del libro

"The narrator of 'Thrown' is an excitable and hyper-educated philosophy student. One day in Des Moines, this prickly scholar grows restless at an academic conference. The topic is her specialty, phenomenology, which, among other things, holds the idea that no two people experience reality in exactly the same way. Wandering out, she stumbles on something different ' a mixed martial arts tournament.

'This interested me,' she writes, 'only in that it appeared to be the honest kind of butchery in which the theory-mangling, logic-maiming academics I had just abandoned would never partake.'

New to combat sports, our philosopher perches in the crowd to watch men in an octagonal cage try to dismember each other. Her arcane but, she insists, 'astute' remarks on the action make the fan next to her change his seat. Still, she is mesmerized.

One fighter in particular, Sean Huffman, loses with dramatic and bloody resilience. This spectacle triggers sensations so overwhelming to the scholar that she associates them with ecstatic reactions to violent rituals as described by Nietzsche and Schopenhauer.

'Thrown' offers many possible uses for the title verb, but this one is crucial. The experience has thrown her as hard as any fighter slammed to the canvas. She could be describing her own condition when, later, she defines Heideggers concept of 'thrownness (the 'poignant sense of having been hurled into the world without preparation or consent . . . ).'" (Katherine Dunn, New York Times)