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Jul. 7th, 2013 12:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsWhen 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 the entire last quarter of the book, the turning point in which Eilis decides whether she's going to continue her American transformations or return to the life she left, is finally decided COMPLETELY BY SOMEONE ELSE'S INTERFERENCE and she never actually makes the choice for herself. WHY.
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 the entire last quarter of the book, the turning point in which Eilis decides whether she's going to continue her American transformations or return to the life she left, is finally decided COMPLETELY BY SOMEONE ELSE'S INTERFERENCE and she never actually makes the choice for herself. WHY.
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.
