Musings from Redwing Marsh
Finally! Air conditioning in my office--I can breathe deeply again. I think the staff at our local Starbucks has been wondering if I'm homeless.
I have appreciated reading the comments to my last post and wish I could respond to each person personally, to thank them for weighing in, but since you did not leave a URL or way to contact you, I will just say thank you!
Last night in a pique of frustration, I heaved Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty into the "to be returned" pile. I'm halfway through, and the second hundred pages (there are nearly 400 in the book), do not appear to advance the plot, at least not to my befuddled mind. The middle is mired in the doldrums. The last three nights I have read it, I have found myself again and again reading the words while lost in thought about other things. I have tried to persist, but, Booker-Prize judges, the story is not going anywhere there in the middle!
Onward. I turned to Mitch Cullin's A Slight Trick of the Mind, a novel that imagines the emotional life of Sherlock Holmes in his nineties. A psychological probing of a fictional character that has been portrayed as emotionless intrigues me. Check out Mitch Cullin's Web site--I love it! Inventive, like his fiction.
(I'm sorry that the book link connects to a Washington Post review that you need to sign on for, but it was the only review I could find, and it's well worth reading. Why not sign up? Just give a fake name or something.)
I have appreciated reading the comments to my last post and wish I could respond to each person personally, to thank them for weighing in, but since you did not leave a URL or way to contact you, I will just say thank you!
Last night in a pique of frustration, I heaved Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty into the "to be returned" pile. I'm halfway through, and the second hundred pages (there are nearly 400 in the book), do not appear to advance the plot, at least not to my befuddled mind. The middle is mired in the doldrums. The last three nights I have read it, I have found myself again and again reading the words while lost in thought about other things. I have tried to persist, but, Booker-Prize judges, the story is not going anywhere there in the middle!Onward. I turned to Mitch Cullin's A Slight Trick of the Mind, a novel that imagines the emotional life of Sherlock Holmes in his nineties. A psychological probing of a fictional character that has been portrayed as emotionless intrigues me. Check out Mitch Cullin's Web site--I love it! Inventive, like his fiction.
(I'm sorry that the book link connects to a Washington Post review that you need to sign on for, but it was the only review I could find, and it's well worth reading. Why not sign up? Just give a fake name or something.)
2 Comments:
i take back what i said about ulyssses - there is conflict in that back, albeit very subtle - stephen searching for a home and a father, bloom wrestling with his wife's infidelity, there's conflict in the newspaper chapter where he struggles to get work done, in the hades chapter where the other attendants rudely exclude him from conversation. so i don't think one can write a story without conflict. it's good though that your attempting to think outside the box but you can still accept the premise that conflict is necessary and think inside the box. also you can post comments on your blog - that way you can respond to us.
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