In October 1989, a set of triplets is born, and it is this moment their father chooses to reveal his affair. Pandemonium ensues. Over two decades later, Sebastian is recruited to join a mysterious organization, the London Institute of Cognitive Science, where he meets Laura Kadinsky, a patient whose inability to see the world in three dimensions is not the only thing about her that intrigues him. Meanwhile, Clara has traveled to Easter Island to join a doomsday cult, and the third triplet, Matilda, is in Sweden, trying to escape from the color blue. Then something happens that forces the triplets to reunite. Their mother calls with worrying news: their father has gone missing and she has something to tell them, a twenty-five-year secret that will change all their lives...
Global in scope, Amanda Svensson’s hefty novel boasts even heftier themes ... Because she’s a novelist rather than a scientist, her discoveries are carefully planted; and, as you might expect of Ali Smith’s Swedish translator, she is playfully experimental ... For a novel largely concerned with dysfunction, depression and existential despair, A System So Magnificent It Is Blinding is surprisingly funny. LICS is part nightmare, part farce, with Corrigan presiding as both magus and maniac ... There’s much tenderness, too.
The siblings’ rotating stories propel Svensson’s chaotic family saga in all sorts of bizarre and involving directions — it’s almost as if you’re being dared to keep up with it all. A camarilla of crackbrained supporting characters only adds to the bedlam, weaving in and out of the triplets’ respective tales ... The triplets and their mélange of cuckoo birds may be interesting to gape at, but after rumbling along for 500-plus pages their misadventures and, more important, motivations become increasingly opaque, with Svensson hatching a bunch of literary Easter eggs that end up rather scrambled. She welters in thinky asides ... As a result, the siblings themselves eventually seem neither particularly interesting nor complex, but come to resemble the cliché of insufferable millennials absorbed in their own incessant navel gazing ... Buckling up for Svensson’s long, strange trip does prove kind of worth it, however, if for no other reason than to luxuriate in her nitid descriptions.
