Author Archives: Theryn

The next big narrative form

In the academic world, there’s a building consensus that video games are the next big narrative form; there are an increasing number of games studies programs. I’m not a gamer, and not particularly convinced of their artistic value; but the argument could certainly be made that one of the futures of the book — particularly the future of the desire for entertainment, which was first taken from the book by film and then by television — has moved on to the game world.

—Dan Visel

The syncing up of story worlds

As an academic and a bit of a bookworm, I take a certain delight in this representation of the syncing up of story worlds: in addition to the obvious usefulness of shared references in prosaic domains, there is something fantastically intimate (romance novels aside, even) about the experience of reading something someone else is reading.

—Kirsten Valentine Cadieux

20: The Lighthouse

The Lighthouse by P.D. James

Another library book sale find. Wasn’t a library book, though. Looked brand-new, still with remainder price tag on. Zing!

So it’s a police procedural in PD James’s Adam Dalgliesh series, with the three detective characters (who presumably, regular readers would be familiar with from previous books) sent to a private island to investigate a murder. The book starts out by introducing each of them in turn, and providing quite a bit of detail about each of their back stories. Which I was fine with in the beginning, but later on I wondered what the point of all that was since it was barely returned to at all in the main story.

The murder mystery itself is decent, but the pacing was bogged down by the amount of description. omg, so much description! Did I really need to know about the minutiae of the furnishings and refrigerators (!) of each cottage and apartment? I do not think so. I seriously felt like this book could have been half as long. With so much wandering detail, The Lighthouse didn’t have the urgency it might have had if it had been trimmed down.

Despite the endless detail, there was curious lack of emotional connection to the characters. Maybe if some of that detail had been cut, James could have expanded on the detectives’ stories that were rather left hanging. As it was, I didn’t find any of the characters particularly compelling. I guess I was supposed to care about Dalgleish mooning over Emma, but I really didn’t, and the other two, Kate and Benton, were like robot-people.

I did kind of wonder why Francis Benton-Smith was called just “Benton.” Mayhap it was explained in a previous book.

The inescapable miscellany of particulars

The recognition that literature promotes a special kind of perception illuminates the contrast between miscellany and integrity. Modern science generates a general intellectual tendency to subsume particular phenomena, under general laws.  We acquire this disposition from an early age. When a child dissects a tadpole in a school laboratory, she is taught that the interest is not in that creature, but in coming to an understanding of the anatomy of tadpoles in general, of all tadpoles.  Were she to rest with the thought that she has come to know something just about that particular tadpole, she would be seen to suffer from an intellectual defect.

…

Literature has no such aspiration.  A literary person, were she to find a tadpole alluring, would likely visit her attentions upon that one creature.  Love, a theme more common than God (and not always unrelated) in literature, is typically the love of someone. A poet may have general opinions she presents about the nature of love and about which qualities are lovable and which not, but when she is not in this way being a philosopher manqué in passing, when she is most doing what a poet does, her work is expressing or conveying the expression of the love that someone has for another.  That is the link between the expressive aspects of literature that I began with and the inescapable miscellany of particulars that litter a literary work, particulars that in science or philosophy would be viewed as confusion, clutter, failure.

—Akeel Bilgrami

About the world

I imagine autobiographical writers are writers who write about their own lives and their life stories. There’s a difference to me between your life and your memories. Of course I have memories about my own life, my own family, but a lot of memories I carry with me are about the world. And those are not—I don’t think those can be called—autobiographical. Those are really observations. I remember these things, but you have to make sense of these memories by writing other people’s stories, rather than your own stories.

…

My inclination was not to write nonfiction, but what I got from nonfiction was that I can write nonfiction. Because I hate to write about myself and talk about myself, but I realized there are ways to write nonfiction that’s really not about yourself, but about the world. That makes me very happy.

—Yiyun Li

What leads us back

We think of writing as springing from memory, when in fact it may be that memory often springs from writing. The assumption that memory is waiting to spill its contents onto the page may be faulty. More likely, the writing, as guided by the music of the writer’s voice, is what leads us back through a labyrinth to a memory we once lost. The commitment to the writing, the attending to the presentness of the narrative, the act of imagining, the willingness to trust inspiration may be the surest route to the vividness of memory.

—Steven Schwartz