tweety02011b58

How novels work is that they haunt you like a ghost, wind about your limbs like an anaconda, shake you like the wind shakes the barley, burn you like the eyes of a cop with too many bad stories to tell, charm you like next door's underwear hanging on the line to dry, electrify you like the Soviet Union 1920 to 1925, orbit you like cats in boats on the Sea of Tranquillity, make you come back for more like a tragic ex, and little Lolita will give you the third degree, Seymour Glass will look out of your mirror, and Ishmael will say well – you know what to call me. What do I call you? George Eliot said If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. This book is an intellectual autopsy of novels, what bits go where, why they work, why they don't – the title, the epigraph, the prologue, the framing device, the inadequate narrator, skaz, direct addresses to the reader, omniscience (what kind of science is that?), free indirect style (thank you Jane Austen), character, motive, antihero (oh Flashman), real people (hello Dr Crippen, bonjour tristesse), roman a clef (who is really who? really? wow) and fleuve (sweet Thames flow softly), genre, thrillers, romance, satire, magical realism, historical, voices, dialect (wotcher mate - ugh), dialogue, languages, translation, telephone conversations (there's one in Proust!), cliché, swearing, structure, time, chapter titles, or not, inset narratives, parallel narratives (I always remember how to spell parallel because there are two parallel lines in the middle of the word), story (what happens), narrative (how you get told about what happens), plot (what made what happened happen), not all novels have plots, not all novels have stories, prolepsis (ooh, I'd see a doctor dearie), details, location, weather, meals, brands, style, parataxis (they won't get you home), paragraphs (there's an eleven-page paragraph in Kafka), diction, amplification (thank you Philip ROTH), parenthesis (huh?), hyperbole (Money - Money - MONEY), pastiche (Possession), heteroglossia (Ulysses), streams of Woolf, letters (My dear Count), emails, similes, ekphrosis, manes (no that's just horses), names (I have real problem with very silly names and I'm looking at Thomas Pynchon), coincidences (of all the gin joints), literariness, symbolism, Russian dolls, false endings (like in I Got You Babe), and real endings (like now).

2022-10-21 05:38