pictures of people
Before I consign the Moleskine to the Drawer of Departed Diaries, I thought I should copy out my thoughts on Christopher Priest's The Affirmation since I had noted down an initial impression.
This is prolly not very cohesive, more me working through my reactions in even more haphazard fashion than usual because I'm lecturing/warning myself about my own novel.
The writer parts of it are sooo chillingly accurate. But he's kind of clinical. I don't like the way he skips time within a scene, too cursory, ironically (or not?) comes across exactly as the synopsis quality his narrator picks about his manuscript.
And there's something weirdly lacking and unrealistic about his dialogue, something I found in The Prestige but that could be attributed to the time period. Here, I don't know, the dialogue seems a little too clean, a little too formal. Odd. Kinda makes me realise that I really do like my dialogue messy and even overly naturalistic. Huh.
Still for all that, I really do like the cruel messy emotions of his narrator. I'm not so interested in the alternative world narrative and that makes me uneasy, I find myself skimming that and wishing I could get back to the real world narrative.
Which makes me suspect he's going to switch everything around and sock me hard with a plot twist at some point.
[next day]
Finished The Affirmation about half an hour ago. Yeah, not that impressed. There was a fairly large reveal in the last act and I did get somewhat shocked but so didn't feel it.
I didn't feel it because the narrator didn't seem to feel it. Really couldn't relate to him with his weirdly dispassionate cold way towards things. Which is prolly why I finished with this slightly irritated sense of dissatisfaction. Couldn't help but compare my reaction to this novel with my reaction to Anyone Out There?. That destroyed and rebuilt me. This felt more like an intellectual exercise rather than a true exploration/illumination/reflection of the experience of grief and guilt.
Dunno.
It kinda left me cold. I saw what he was doing, I saw the story between the lines and yeah, it didn't move me as much as it could have. I'm not even sure he wanted to move the reader, seemed just a little too preoccupied with the intellectual brilliance of his metaphor rather than really loving his narrator and drawing us deeper into the messy traumatised emotions of that character. Can't help but think that Luke Davies and Marian Keyes did it so much better, with so much more efficacy of emotion.
Intellect is all very well in fiction, isn't it, but there's no real sublime or sense of the sublime without the emotion.
Even if that wasn't his point at all, doesn't make for a very satisfying read. It's not as if I wanted a different ending or different events. He could have written the whole thing with exactly the same plot but more feeling, more mess and basic contradiction, more naturalism, more emotional verisimilitude. So that when it ended the way it ended, I felt it more.
Of course it's an excellent idea, the whole madness and sanity, delusion and reality, writer and subject, overlaid with the terrible humanity of grief and guilt. Of course it's a fucking great intellectual concept. And it could have been --- certainly would in my hands --- a horribly purple blood and tear soaked hysterical violent narrative. And yeah, that could have been an entirely different kind of sin. Then I might have reacted in Isabelle The Navigator style and railed with selfrighteous fury.
But this is the other extreme. I'm fairly certain this clinical detachment was a precise deliberate decision on his part. Did he think this detachment would highlight the total emotional fuckupedness of his narrator? Yeah, possibly. I get that.
I just wonder if he went a little too far, whether he passed the point of happy median. Medium? Median? Wth. The Marian Keyes median. See, there y'go. Luke Davies on one extreme, Christopher Priest on the other and Marian Keyes sitting perfect in the middle.
All of course in my humble unpicking opinion. Tear in the eye of the beholder and all that.
He has fucking excellent titles, though. Srsly. How utterly baffling and mysterious they seem at first glance and then ohhhh how brilliantly he unpacks them through the story and finally at the end when you close the book and think about the whole, how fabulously the title comes to encircle it all. With The Prestige, it chilled the fuck out of me. With this, I saw clinically what he'd done and appreciated the intelligence of it but there was no accompanying emotion.
And okay, I did say before that I liked the narrator's wild messy emotions. That didn't continue. As the unreality of the alternate diemension spilled into his real life or what seemed like his real life, I cared less and less. I couldn't relate and he didn't pull me in, his increasing disconnectedness let me go. He just wasn't reacting in degrees that compelled me into his experience.
Huh.
I won't know with Arushka until Ari reads it and fair enough. Just have to keep going on the hope and my own emotional veracity, barometer of.
I love that I seem to be listening to only Petey on the iNano and only Laurie at home. I could be accused of burying myself in the Eighties, couldn't I? Looking backwards instead of forward. Only weirdly enough, it feels like I'm pursuing an evolution rather than a regression.
That's what you get for Aquarian and Gemini artistry. Heh.
This is prolly not very cohesive, more me working through my reactions in even more haphazard fashion than usual because I'm lecturing/warning myself about my own novel.
The writer parts of it are sooo chillingly accurate. But he's kind of clinical. I don't like the way he skips time within a scene, too cursory, ironically (or not?) comes across exactly as the synopsis quality his narrator picks about his manuscript.
And there's something weirdly lacking and unrealistic about his dialogue, something I found in The Prestige but that could be attributed to the time period. Here, I don't know, the dialogue seems a little too clean, a little too formal. Odd. Kinda makes me realise that I really do like my dialogue messy and even overly naturalistic. Huh.
Still for all that, I really do like the cruel messy emotions of his narrator. I'm not so interested in the alternative world narrative and that makes me uneasy, I find myself skimming that and wishing I could get back to the real world narrative.
Which makes me suspect he's going to switch everything around and sock me hard with a plot twist at some point.
[next day]
Finished The Affirmation about half an hour ago. Yeah, not that impressed. There was a fairly large reveal in the last act and I did get somewhat shocked but so didn't feel it.
I didn't feel it because the narrator didn't seem to feel it. Really couldn't relate to him with his weirdly dispassionate cold way towards things. Which is prolly why I finished with this slightly irritated sense of dissatisfaction. Couldn't help but compare my reaction to this novel with my reaction to Anyone Out There?. That destroyed and rebuilt me. This felt more like an intellectual exercise rather than a true exploration/illumination/reflection of the experience of grief and guilt.
Dunno.
It kinda left me cold. I saw what he was doing, I saw the story between the lines and yeah, it didn't move me as much as it could have. I'm not even sure he wanted to move the reader, seemed just a little too preoccupied with the intellectual brilliance of his metaphor rather than really loving his narrator and drawing us deeper into the messy traumatised emotions of that character. Can't help but think that Luke Davies and Marian Keyes did it so much better, with so much more efficacy of emotion.
Intellect is all very well in fiction, isn't it, but there's no real sublime or sense of the sublime without the emotion.
Even if that wasn't his point at all, doesn't make for a very satisfying read. It's not as if I wanted a different ending or different events. He could have written the whole thing with exactly the same plot but more feeling, more mess and basic contradiction, more naturalism, more emotional verisimilitude. So that when it ended the way it ended, I felt it more.
Of course it's an excellent idea, the whole madness and sanity, delusion and reality, writer and subject, overlaid with the terrible humanity of grief and guilt. Of course it's a fucking great intellectual concept. And it could have been --- certainly would in my hands --- a horribly purple blood and tear soaked hysterical violent narrative. And yeah, that could have been an entirely different kind of sin. Then I might have reacted in Isabelle The Navigator style and railed with selfrighteous fury.
But this is the other extreme. I'm fairly certain this clinical detachment was a precise deliberate decision on his part. Did he think this detachment would highlight the total emotional fuckupedness of his narrator? Yeah, possibly. I get that.
I just wonder if he went a little too far, whether he passed the point of happy median. Medium? Median? Wth. The Marian Keyes median. See, there y'go. Luke Davies on one extreme, Christopher Priest on the other and Marian Keyes sitting perfect in the middle.
All of course in my humble unpicking opinion. Tear in the eye of the beholder and all that.
He has fucking excellent titles, though. Srsly. How utterly baffling and mysterious they seem at first glance and then ohhhh how brilliantly he unpacks them through the story and finally at the end when you close the book and think about the whole, how fabulously the title comes to encircle it all. With The Prestige, it chilled the fuck out of me. With this, I saw clinically what he'd done and appreciated the intelligence of it but there was no accompanying emotion.
And okay, I did say before that I liked the narrator's wild messy emotions. That didn't continue. As the unreality of the alternate diemension spilled into his real life or what seemed like his real life, I cared less and less. I couldn't relate and he didn't pull me in, his increasing disconnectedness let me go. He just wasn't reacting in degrees that compelled me into his experience.
Huh.
I won't know with Arushka until Ari reads it and fair enough. Just have to keep going on the hope and my own emotional veracity, barometer of.
I love that I seem to be listening to only Petey on the iNano and only Laurie at home. I could be accused of burying myself in the Eighties, couldn't I? Looking backwards instead of forward. Only weirdly enough, it feels like I'm pursuing an evolution rather than a regression.
That's what you get for Aquarian and Gemini artistry. Heh.