NP: Joeseph McElroy & Coetzee

[Ghetta Life]

Hey folks!  During my forced "vacation" (evacuation) from New Orleans, I 
took a couple of books along, and They've both turned out to be great:  
*Actress in the House* by McElroy & *Elizabeth Costello* by Coetzee.  Just 
finished both in that order.

*Actress in the House* is amazing!  Beautiful writing, but difficult, and 
like no one else I know.  This Village Voice review puts it nicely: 
"McElroy's difficulty lies in his unrelenting commitment to what might be 
best described as synaptic verisimilitude, a sort of neural-based fiction 
that seeks to re-create the jagged contours of "real life" via Möbius-strip 
sentences elastic enough to accommodate vertiginous digressions and multiple 
points of view but that, in reality, whatever that means, bears little 
resemblance to realism as traditionally depicted."

http://www.villagevoice.com/books/0323,essex,44540,10.html

McElroy is a slow read.  You HAVE to read it slowly in order to not get lost 
and miss half of what's being communicated.  It tells a story by returning 
over and over again to fragments of different stories, releasing a little 
bit more each time and providing connections between them over a long period 
of narrative.  In some ways it reminds me of *Ulysses* because it forces the 
reader to recreate the bigger story from a multitude of fragments  I think I 
just might start right back again from the beginning before my next book.

*Elizabeth Costello* is also great.  It is concerned with many things, 
including the "mission" of a fiction writer.  This is NOT postmodernism, 
more an exploration of the role of an artist in this present world.

Ghetta

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