Thursday, April 22, 2004
the lemon of pink.
move to Iceland.
don't drive.
i finished reading three novels in three days. two of which i'd been laboring on since christmas and another which i finished in two days. William Faulkner's the sound and the fury was one of the most difficult novels i have ever read (granted i haven't sunk my teef into ulysses yet). yet, the fractured narrative and long, sweeping fractal-like verbals resembled Aesop Rock more than anything in the american literary canon. jason, the racist, cynical ass character who narrates the third section was the most well-developed and readable of the four main sections. this shit was dense. i had to press rewind a few times.
Sandra Cisneros' the house on mango street was the next one i mowed through. a criminally simple read after chugging through the waist-high complexity of Faulkner, Cisneros' non-linear narrativity is something i wanted to hug (theres something about fragmented narratives that got me open, enough to want to work on a thesis before i even get to grad school). the narrator and main character of Esperanza, reminded me of too many people in my life. my sister and three female cousins in particular. it was heartwarming, yet not trite. to experience the various tiny moments that make life awkward, enjoyable and difficult for a young mexican-american girl in Chicago was a narrative i know all too well (though i grew up in Houston). a terrific book. worth the hype.
lastly, i finally finished Thomas M. Disch's masterpiece, camp concentration. somewhere between Faulkner and Cisneros, in terms of narrative structure, exists Disch. odd comparisons, i know. regardless, perhaps it was my stretching this book over a span of two years (i can be kind of bad when it comes to sticking to a novel when i have a stackful of others to tend to), but it wore thin by its end. i thought that Louis Sachetti, as a character, was fascinating and certainly enduring his drive-thru intellectualism and referencing (to signify Palladine's potency) was profound and very believable. but, by the novel's end, i thought the rest of the characters (H.H. and Schipansky) seemed flat and merely conduits to display Sachetti's experiences. Similar to Baldwin's critique of Wright's characters in Native Son, though thats a whole different situation.
all in all, some good stuff. couple that with finishing Langston Hughes' The Big Sea and Samuel R. Delany's amazing autobiography of life in the Lower East Side during the 60's (and even hitchhiking through Houston! what what!) The Motion of Light in Water, it hasnt been a bad semester in terms of reading. but, the summer is about to begin....
sorry Tolstoy.
on to the next one....
|
don't drive.
i finished reading three novels in three days. two of which i'd been laboring on since christmas and another which i finished in two days. William Faulkner's the sound and the fury was one of the most difficult novels i have ever read (granted i haven't sunk my teef into ulysses yet). yet, the fractured narrative and long, sweeping fractal-like verbals resembled Aesop Rock more than anything in the american literary canon. jason, the racist, cynical ass character who narrates the third section was the most well-developed and readable of the four main sections. this shit was dense. i had to press rewind a few times.
Sandra Cisneros' the house on mango street was the next one i mowed through. a criminally simple read after chugging through the waist-high complexity of Faulkner, Cisneros' non-linear narrativity is something i wanted to hug (theres something about fragmented narratives that got me open, enough to want to work on a thesis before i even get to grad school). the narrator and main character of Esperanza, reminded me of too many people in my life. my sister and three female cousins in particular. it was heartwarming, yet not trite. to experience the various tiny moments that make life awkward, enjoyable and difficult for a young mexican-american girl in Chicago was a narrative i know all too well (though i grew up in Houston). a terrific book. worth the hype.
lastly, i finally finished Thomas M. Disch's masterpiece, camp concentration. somewhere between Faulkner and Cisneros, in terms of narrative structure, exists Disch. odd comparisons, i know. regardless, perhaps it was my stretching this book over a span of two years (i can be kind of bad when it comes to sticking to a novel when i have a stackful of others to tend to), but it wore thin by its end. i thought that Louis Sachetti, as a character, was fascinating and certainly enduring his drive-thru intellectualism and referencing (to signify Palladine's potency) was profound and very believable. but, by the novel's end, i thought the rest of the characters (H.H. and Schipansky) seemed flat and merely conduits to display Sachetti's experiences. Similar to Baldwin's critique of Wright's characters in Native Son, though thats a whole different situation.
all in all, some good stuff. couple that with finishing Langston Hughes' The Big Sea and Samuel R. Delany's amazing autobiography of life in the Lower East Side during the 60's (and even hitchhiking through Houston! what what!) The Motion of Light in Water, it hasnt been a bad semester in terms of reading. but, the summer is about to begin....
sorry Tolstoy.
on to the next one....
