I won’t say each and every literary experiment is successful. But it does raise a question about so-called “difficult” books and whether or not they’re challenging literary norms in an artistically valid way, or just presenting unnecessary roadblocks to their readers, when their themes could presumably be more effectively communicated by not making everyone wonder if they’re just too stupid to get it.Ĭonsider me a staunch defender of difficult books. If you think of critics as cats, then Finnegan’s Wake is basically a literary red laser pointer, keeping them and their pretentious, academic, gatekeeping ways occupied so they’ll leave normal people alone to read what they please. Joyce answered that he just wanted to give critics something to do for the next 300 years. There is a story about James Joyce that’s probably apocryphal, but it goes like this: A journalist asked Joyce why he made Finnegan’s Wake so freaking hard. Share book reviews and ratings with Thomas, and even join a book club on Goodreads. Book cover artwork is copyrighted by its respective artist and/or publisher. New readers will want to read Borne before diving into its multi-dimensional sequel.All reviews and site design © by Thomas M. Highly recommended for those interested in sf invested in ecological concerns and speculative fiction that plays with narrative form.
The varied points of view and stylistic shifts of the narrative allow the reader to experience reality through the eyes of different characters, human and otherwise, and the struggle of different forms of life trying to survive unites the vignettes that form the bulk of the novel. As these three lovers and companions come to the latest version of the City and the sinister Company, the established patterns of their war across realities begin to shift, with factors such as the demented and tortured Charlie X, a mysterious blue fox, a vast leviathan, and the dark bird known as “the duck with a broken wing” all come into play. The fragmented narrative centers primarily on the dead astronauts at the crossroads from Borne, revealed to be three revolutionaries consisting of former Company workers/experiments Chen and Moss and the formerly lost-in-space Grayson. Vandermeer’s follow-up to Borne(2017) explores the multiple pasts and futures of the City and the sinister Company that twists and destroys countless living things.
0 kommentar(er)
