Book with typographical gimmicks

[bekah]

At 6:16 PM -0700 9/13/06, Henry Winkler wrote:
>Re. books featuring typographical gimmicks, did anyone like Jonathan 
>Safran Foer novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close? I thought it 
>was pretty good.


I listened to it on my iPod.   :-)   Didn't catch the visuals but I 
heard about them later.   I think they would have helped in the first 
half of the book - at least added some interest because truthfully, 
I was bored and  Oskar was irritating.   I did see some of the 
graphics he used on a web-site somewhere.  ???  and they looked 
mildly interesting.  (If I had known there were visuals I would have 
bought the book!)

I like graphics in novels (although not graphic novels)   *if they're 
well done.*   Seabold's Austerlitz was wonderful and the graphics 
were an integral part of the reading experience.  They brought home 
to me the fact that even if Austerlitz was a work of fiction,  it was 
based on very a real and historical event,  the Holocaust.   The 
graphics in that book were not in any way gimmicky.   There have been 
other books,  some from Victorian times (did someone mention Tristram 
Shandy?)  some from today,  where graphics add a kind of tone or 
texture,  another dimension to the realism,  maybe?   But there are 
other books where graphics can annoyingly distract the reader from 
the text.     I think if a reader is so focused on the text and 
regards the graphics like the wood-cuts of old,  extraneous,  cute, 
interesting , but not a part of the reading experience,  he can miss 
a part of what the author is attempting to do with them.   Otoh,  the 
author may have just tried a gimmick so  I have to look at the 
individual books and graphics and let them play on me  a minute. 
They may work,  they may not.     Eco's Queen Leona used graphics and 
the effect was fun more than anything.  They were nostalgia images 
and the fact they were really visual (as opposed to visualizing) made 
me realize that Eco was trying to give me the sense of what the old 
man was doing,  remembering "only" a fleeting image and having to dig 
for the associations.  The reader in this case probably has no 
associations to Italian pop art of the 1940s so it works -  kind of. 
You have to look at the graphics and try to figure why the author is 
using them and then let that be for a few minutes,  a few pages,  and 
see if it works.   You can't really "skim" the graphics like you'd 
think (unless that's what the author intended).

Back to Foer,  I think he used graphics to intensify the realism; 
9/11 was a very real event,  Oskar is an imaginary boy.  Foer is 
pointing to 9/11 with the graphics.    In that way he used them like 
Seabold although Foer's graphics were apparently more varied in 
nature than just photos.  (This is probably as clear as mud. - maybe 
I need a graphic.) (g)

Perhaps graphics always add to realism because they make an invented 
world tangible.  Sometimes the invented world is a reflection of the 
real world (use photos) but other times the invented world is a 
product of the author's mind (use drawings).

Graphics used to always distract me from my own visualizations of the 
text.   But lately,  since Seabold,  I've been allowing the author to 
guide me with graphics as well as with words.

Sorry for the windy reply,
Bekah