Strange that so many people
have never heard of that book, and that of those who have so many found it to be unreadable. It was a HUGE success in the 70s, so I thought it pretty famous...

I guess I can understand why so many people had trouble with it, though- it's pretty abstract a lot of the time, and the way he wrote it is as though he were writing two books at the same time- so you have the current time storyline of the motorcycle trip with his son spliced between chunks of following the story of Phaedrus and his ideas and conclusions. (Phaedrus, for those who haven't read the book, was how he referred to himself as he was in the past. He went mad and was given electroshock therapy, so he views that chunk of his life as being something lived by someone else, and is telling the story from third person as a result.) So you have a rather mundane description of the motorcycle trip that people might find uninteresting, then a chunk of metaphysics, then back to the trip. I find that when I re-read it I tend to skim through the bits about the trip with the Sutherlands and read more heavily the chunks of metaphysics.

It still made one hell of an impact on me as a teenager, though.
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Tue 20 May 2008, 15:52, Reply)