NP: Joeseph McElroy & Coetzee
Ghetta Life
ghetta_outta at hotmail.com
Mon Oct 3 15:43:11 CDT 2005
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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