tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5424364424049242300.post1284259133251148999..comments2023-06-21T18:53:11.897+10:00Comments on Pykk: the eye fixed on the fishermanUmbagollahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14556344092820711893noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5424364424049242300.post-23279843845268371232017-01-07T17:46:42.323+11:002017-01-07T17:46:42.323+11:00It would make an interesting contrast to Tolstoy, ...It would make an interesting contrast to Tolstoy, and even to Proust, considering that time in Spatola is merged and recurring in its own way and for completely different reasons.<br /><br />If you're tired of causality then there's less of it in the Balestrini random assemblage technique than any other writing method I can think of. It made his book seem unusually calm. Once you accustomed yourself to the idea that nothing you read was ever going to add up to more than the particular isolated action going on in whatever sentence was currently in front of you then it became a matter of waiting patiently for familiar landmarks to come by again. You watch, you wait, and here's another sentence from the riverbank part of the story, now he's in the cave, now she's at the sink brushing her hair, which I remember from another two sentences on the same subject five pages back. Wondering where the cave came from or how he got to it is irrelevant because the He and She never really go to anything, not even in the sentences that tell you "they went to the town of C". They don't "be" in C afterwards. Umbagollahhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14556344092820711893noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5424364424049242300.post-66902561516067282072017-01-07T03:48:04.394+11:002017-01-07T03:48:04.394+11:00I would like to write a book about a detective, wh...I would like to write a book about a detective, where the narrative is assembled randomly rather than with the intent to create deliberate contrast, irony, suspense, etc. Someone told me that Alice Munro actually reads novels out of order, poking around at random here and there until she gets enough of a sense of the book that she feels good abandoning it. It's a different sort of artifice but possibly closer to the experience of how we think about reality, maybe, than is the carefully-structured novel. Admittedly, the causality of the detective novel bores me. The sequel to <i>The Transcendental Detective</i> ends not with the solution of the crime, but with various contradictory suggestions as to the solution. <br /><br />I'm reading Percy Lubbock's book of essays on fiction, and he goes on about how Thackeray created pictures, more or less tapestries to be viewed by standing still, rather than dramatized stories. I see that <i>Porthole</i> is short enough that it could be read in a day or two; I may have to borrow it from the university library. scott g.f.baileyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05726743149139510832noreply@blogger.com