That Which I am Reading…
I’m sure Luke is reading something too, but he’s still on vacay (I know, rough life, right?) and so, this week, we go with the singular pronoun.
I appear to be on a magical realism kick which is interesting because it isn’t a sub-genre toward which I gravitate. I find it, to a large extent, impenetrable and weighty. Also dour. Very, very dour. Some of the elephant may be a loss of linguistic deftness in translation from the original language (most commonly in my previous choices Spanish and Russian) to clunky, mongrel American English which, while highly flexible and adaptable as an old West whore, just isn’t as lovely, or as subtle, as… well, every other language every invented. Not even Esperanto. Case in point, The House of the Spirits (Isabel Allende, 1982) left me fascinated but adrift while La Casa de los Espiritus (yep, same book, but original language) grabbed, held, and enchanted. My Spanish, even at it’s best, however, was never sophisticated enough for Gabriel Garcia Marquez (believe me, I tried) nor have my attempts to teach myself Russian amounted to the vocabulary necessary to comprehend a single phrase from The Master and Margarita (Mikhail Bulgakov, 1966 [posthumous]).
There’s a difference, however, between the aforementioned and the books I’m reading now: whimsy. Which is not to say it’s all Tinkerbell and shit. There are troubles and there is darkness and malice and viciousness. But there’s a joy in what’s possible, wonder and awe and the sort of tiny spark we’ve all felt at one time or another whether we want to admit it or not.
I blew through Chocolat by Joanne Harris (1999) earlier this week. Gobbled in up in two days and was absolutely enchanted all the way through. Highly, highly recommend.
Yesterday, I moved on to:
(image via amazon.com)
Granted, I’m not all that far in yet, but the book starts with a carnival-sideshow on an island in Florida wherein (whereat?) a woman high dives into a a swamp full of alligators. Because that’s her job. How can this book be anything but awesome? There’s a whiff of maybe/maybe not ghosts, a hint of soul selling, a missing father, and a thirteen year old kid running the gator pit in everyone else’s absence. I know, right?
I’ll keep you posted. For now? Trading in some writing time for someone else’s story. And being totally okay with it.
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