It seems almost cliché to note the distracted and disparate plurality of a certain contemporary consciousness which has developed alongside personal computers and of the blogosphere, with its roots in television and cable. But it is precisely an overexposed and impatient population that is not only increasingly typical, but increasingly typical even of the readership of ambitious contemporary fiction. So it's interesting to observe how writers over the past decade have responded to this ongoing development, from Helen DeWitt's The Last Samurai, an infoscape of almost irreconcilable facts and figures interspersed with a story, up to David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, which lurches forward autistically, re-engaging the reader with a radically new voice every few dozen pages. The final products are hardly similar aesthetically; the first, as one critic put it, achieves "a truly new story, a truly new form" and, the critic would probably agree, a truly new voice, while the other resolutely and unabashedly uses an assortment of appropriated, hackneyed ideas and even luscious genres and voices to weave into a set of thematic concerns intended to resonate across time and space. Yet even though the two works are so different in form, on closer inspection it becomes apparent that they share at least a pair of particular characteristics essential to their jaded contemporary audiences: first, both immediately and frequently use an interesting and unexpected language while mishandling the formal. narrative in a way that quickly and repeatedly gains and maintains the interest and attention of an easily distracted reader. Second, both works include a number of passages which speak to the purpose of the respective projects but which are subtly interwoven with the narratives in order to allow the attentive and intelligent reader the pleasure of discovery and a sense of self-satisfaction (although more obtuse ). metafictional moments also permeate both, although less vitally). Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay Although DeWitt's novel begins with a prologue that delivers a rather simple, hilarious and accessible preliminary narrative, as the body of the novel's main text begins, much like the reader's disorientation in the midst of an encyclopedic narration and disjointed. The reader is immediately intrigued by the brutal accuracy, frank intellectuality, and awkward, tantalizing pauses of Sibylla, the narrator; However, he or she is also discouraged by the mid-sentence pauses in the narrative and by the density of information that seems to extend to Western culture and language (and Kurosawa, of course). But The Last Samurai is definitely a book of great scope, and if one gives it the same benefit of the doubt that Sibylla gives to the obscure German scholar Roemer to begin the tale (or perhaps a dozen more pages), a nice and thoughtful book. The reader will likely be able to move beyond the formal eccentricities and scholarly content and feel complicit in a narrative project that thins and quickens as it progresses. Complicity, however, is hardly the feeling a typical reader will experience when shaken from the concise, undemanding style of the prologue and into Sibylla's personal narrative. Sibylla's story is immediately characterized by the obsession with numbers (six different numbers are