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Jul. 7th, 2013 12:07 pmWhen ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
schiarire visited last fall, she left behind Colm Toibin's Brooklyn as a birthday present, because Ji knows I have a million Brooklyn feelings.
The thing about Colm Toibin is that I took a class from him when he as a writer-in-residence at my undergrad, and but the trouble is that I heard him read from other people's stuff and from his own stuff so often that for several years I lost the ability to consume his prose and not hear his voice reading very loudly in my head. This is a bit distracting when you try to read a book that is noted for having a quiet female voice.
Fortunately the effect faded after a few chapters, at which point I was able to concentrate on the book for itself. Brooklyn is set in the 1950s and focuses on Eilis Lacey, a young Irish woman, who finds herself immigrating to America to get a job in a department store sort of before she's had time to decide whether she actually wants to leave everything she's known and immigrate to America and get a job in a department store.
It's a very close, very thoughtful novel, gorgeously written and full of intelligent and understated moments and observations. It's also HUGELY frustrating because it looks like it's going to be a story about a woman finding her feet and claiming agency, one way or another -- and then
( spoilers, I guess? )
This is my problem too often with literary novels. I mean, I enjoyed the read, don't get me wrong; the virtues it has are definitely virtues, and I'm glad I read it. But while I can understand, intellectually, the appeal of frustrating typical storytelling conventions, and I can understand that 'real life' doesn't often look like a narrative, with consistent character development and a coherent end point, and to some extent I think that's worth pointing out. But there needs to be a balance there, because "welp, that's life, I guess!" is -- for me, at least -- a deeply unsatisfying feeling to walk away from a novel with.
schiarire visited last fall, she left behind Colm Toibin's Brooklyn as a birthday present, because Ji knows I have a million Brooklyn feelings. The thing about Colm Toibin is that I took a class from him when he as a writer-in-residence at my undergrad, and but the trouble is that I heard him read from other people's stuff and from his own stuff so often that for several years I lost the ability to consume his prose and not hear his voice reading very loudly in my head. This is a bit distracting when you try to read a book that is noted for having a quiet female voice.
Fortunately the effect faded after a few chapters, at which point I was able to concentrate on the book for itself. Brooklyn is set in the 1950s and focuses on Eilis Lacey, a young Irish woman, who finds herself immigrating to America to get a job in a department store sort of before she's had time to decide whether she actually wants to leave everything she's known and immigrate to America and get a job in a department store.
It's a very close, very thoughtful novel, gorgeously written and full of intelligent and understated moments and observations. It's also HUGELY frustrating because it looks like it's going to be a story about a woman finding her feet and claiming agency, one way or another -- and then
( spoilers, I guess? ) This is my problem too often with literary novels. I mean, I enjoyed the read, don't get me wrong; the virtues it has are definitely virtues, and I'm glad I read it. But while I can understand, intellectually, the appeal of frustrating typical storytelling conventions, and I can understand that 'real life' doesn't often look like a narrative, with consistent character development and a coherent end point, and to some extent I think that's worth pointing out. But there needs to be a balance there, because "welp, that's life, I guess!" is -- for me, at least -- a deeply unsatisfying feeling to walk away from a novel with.
