It seems almost cliché to note the distracted and disparate plurality of a certain contemporary consciousness that has developed together with personal computers and the blogosphere, with the its roots in television and cable. But it is precisely this overexposed and impatient population that is not only increasingly typical, but increasingly typical of readers of ambitious contemporary fiction. It is therefore interesting to look at the ways in which writers over the last decade have responded to this ongoing development, from Helen DeWitt's The Last Samurai, a panorama of almost irreconcilable facts and figures interspersed with a story, to David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas , which staggers forward autistically, re-engaging the reader with a radically new voice every few dozen pages. The final products are hardly similar aesthetically; the former, as one reviewer put it, crafts "a truly new story, a truly new form" and, the reviewer would probably agree, a truly new voice, while the other decisively and brazenly uses an assortment of appropriate, banal and even pulpy genres and voices to be woven into a series of thematic concerns destined to resonate across time and space. However, although the two works are so different in form, upon closer inspection it becomes apparent that they share at least a particular pair of characteristics essential to their jaded, contemporary audiences: first, both immediately and frequently employ interesting and unexpected language while handling the formal aspect. narrative so as to quickly and repeatedly gain and maintain the interest and attention of even an easily distracted reader. Second, both works include a series of passages that speak to the purpose of their respective projects but which are subtly intertwined with the narratives in a way that allows an attentive and intelligent reader the pleasure of discovery and a sense of self-satisfaction (if more obtuse). metanarrative moments also permeate both, albeit in a less vital way). Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Although DeWitt's novel begins with a prologue that offers a rather simple, entertaining and accessible preliminary narrative, as the main text of the novel begins, as well as disorientating the reader in an encyclopedic and disjointed narrative. The reader is immediately intrigued by the brutal exactitude, frank intellectuality, and tantalizingly self-conscious pauses of Sibylla, the narrator; he or she is equally put off, however, by the mid-sentence breaks in the narrative and the density of information that seem to encompass Western culture and language (and Kurosawa, of course). But The Last Samurai is definitely a weighty book, and if you give it the same benefit of the doubt that Sibylla gives the obscure German scholar Roemer to begin the tale (or perhaps a dozen or more pages), a sympathetic and thoughtful book . The reader will probably be able to go beyond the formal eccentricities and the erudite contents and feel complicit in a narrative project that thins out and accelerates as it progresses. Complicity, however, is hardly the sensation a typical reader will experience in being shaken by the concise and undemanding style of the prologue and immersed in Sibilla's personal narrative. Sibylla's narrative is immediately characterized by numerical obsession (six different numbers are mentioned in the first eight lines), linguistic obsession (the first ten pages or so deal mainly with reflections on the translation into English of a German text), extreme erudition (she claims to be one of fifty people