A few weeks ago, I got a pair of books from Morrie, my friend from Israel, as sort of a belated birthday present. The first was The Eyre Affair, the first Thursday Next novel. I enjoyed it immensely, despite the fact that it takes place in quite possibly the most crazy, out-there alternate history-type setting I've ever read. I burned through it in a few days of reading on the bus as I usually do with "fun" reading. It wasn't particular heavy reading and the plot was very fast paced.
The other book she sent me was The Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. I have been trying to get through this book for the last two weeks and it has been slow going. Not because the book is bad, by any means -- frankly, it's one of the best things I've read in a long time. No, the bad part of this book is that every page is soaked in metaphor and subtext, the characters are so well painted, the plot has so many twists it feels like some sort of MC Escher drawing, and the locations are so detailed that you can almost smell the musty tomes in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. It takes me much longer than usual to read and digest every page, and I still find myself wondering if I missed something. This is a style of writing that I absolutely love, where everything is slowly coming together, and you just kind of drink it in, and feel the climax creeping up your spine, something that is best with this sort of novel. I'm not sure how to classify the book, but I suppose right now I would have to say it is sort of magic realism, or gothic horror, or something sort of combination of both.
Zafon does such a perfect job of making you feel the setting of postwar Barcelona that, even though I've never been to Spain or even anywhere with Spanish architecture really, I can imagine what it looks, sounds, feels, and smells like. Daniel's father's bookstore, the aforementioned Cemetery of Forgotten Books, Mr. Fortuny's abandoned apartment, the streetside cafes, everything seems to come alive. The emotional content of the book just pours out and you're whipped along with the story.
Here's the problem though -- it all just seems so effortless. The way everything just sort of flows together, it's like Zafon was divinely inspired and it just poured out onto the page. It's hard to believe that something so deep and complex could possibly be written in any sort of conventional way. Now, in my head, I know that can't possibly be the case, and I'm sure he spent many nights just wracking his brain for the right metaphor, writing and rewriting, but it just doesn't feel like it at all. The book is, so far, just a masterful work of literature.
Reading books like this just seems to set such a high bar for myself, when I try to do my own writing, that it feels like everything I write is pale and lifeless, and just doesn't even come close to comparing something like that. Part of it, I know, is just that not everyone has that same style. Part of it is that I just haven't practiced enough, especially the last few years. Part of it is that I'm still uncomfortable with the idea of putting that much emotion into the page, because it makes you vulnerable. I just wonder though if I'd even notice if I wrote something with anything close to that kind of resonance though, because I pick everything apart in my mind. Does Zafon look at the book he wrote and marvel at what he managed to put on the page, or does he just look at it and wonder what he could have done better, or what other people see in what he wrote?
It's really hard for me to take compliments about my writing, partly because I know my friends and family probably are not going to tell me to my face "this is the worst piece of crap I've ever read" but also because I think a lot of them just haven't had the exposure to really amazing works of literature that I've been lucky enough to have. Reading even things I didn't think I would like, like Paul Auster's City of Glass, which I read only because it was required for a class, or things I didn't like at all, like Toni Morrison's Beloved, which I thought was a pretentious effort at making a completely unreadable "artsy" book (and yet still had to read three times for various classes in high school and college) exposes me to many more different types of writing that most people ever get exposed to in this day and age. It's hard to feel happy with a compliment from someone whose library consists of Harlequin romances and Dungeons and Dragons tie-in novels -- you almost wish they would say they didn't like it. Of course, no one I know has a reading list that is that bad, but I don't talk to too many people who have read everything from medieval literature to postmodernist novels these days. Even when I was in school, when you are in a writing seminar and everyone there is writing another "slice of life" story about drunk or stoned college kids with crappy love lives, where you just wish everyone involved would drop dead and shut the hell up, it's hard to take them seriously when they talk about how they like what you wrote (or, on the upside, when they say they didn't like what you wrote).
I'm not going to stop reading things like The Shadow of the Wind anytime soon, but I have a real love-hate relationship with them.
The other book she sent me was The Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. I have been trying to get through this book for the last two weeks and it has been slow going. Not because the book is bad, by any means -- frankly, it's one of the best things I've read in a long time. No, the bad part of this book is that every page is soaked in metaphor and subtext, the characters are so well painted, the plot has so many twists it feels like some sort of MC Escher drawing, and the locations are so detailed that you can almost smell the musty tomes in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. It takes me much longer than usual to read and digest every page, and I still find myself wondering if I missed something. This is a style of writing that I absolutely love, where everything is slowly coming together, and you just kind of drink it in, and feel the climax creeping up your spine, something that is best with this sort of novel. I'm not sure how to classify the book, but I suppose right now I would have to say it is sort of magic realism, or gothic horror, or something sort of combination of both.
Zafon does such a perfect job of making you feel the setting of postwar Barcelona that, even though I've never been to Spain or even anywhere with Spanish architecture really, I can imagine what it looks, sounds, feels, and smells like. Daniel's father's bookstore, the aforementioned Cemetery of Forgotten Books, Mr. Fortuny's abandoned apartment, the streetside cafes, everything seems to come alive. The emotional content of the book just pours out and you're whipped along with the story.
Here's the problem though -- it all just seems so effortless. The way everything just sort of flows together, it's like Zafon was divinely inspired and it just poured out onto the page. It's hard to believe that something so deep and complex could possibly be written in any sort of conventional way. Now, in my head, I know that can't possibly be the case, and I'm sure he spent many nights just wracking his brain for the right metaphor, writing and rewriting, but it just doesn't feel like it at all. The book is, so far, just a masterful work of literature.
Reading books like this just seems to set such a high bar for myself, when I try to do my own writing, that it feels like everything I write is pale and lifeless, and just doesn't even come close to comparing something like that. Part of it, I know, is just that not everyone has that same style. Part of it is that I just haven't practiced enough, especially the last few years. Part of it is that I'm still uncomfortable with the idea of putting that much emotion into the page, because it makes you vulnerable. I just wonder though if I'd even notice if I wrote something with anything close to that kind of resonance though, because I pick everything apart in my mind. Does Zafon look at the book he wrote and marvel at what he managed to put on the page, or does he just look at it and wonder what he could have done better, or what other people see in what he wrote?
It's really hard for me to take compliments about my writing, partly because I know my friends and family probably are not going to tell me to my face "this is the worst piece of crap I've ever read" but also because I think a lot of them just haven't had the exposure to really amazing works of literature that I've been lucky enough to have. Reading even things I didn't think I would like, like Paul Auster's City of Glass, which I read only because it was required for a class, or things I didn't like at all, like Toni Morrison's Beloved, which I thought was a pretentious effort at making a completely unreadable "artsy" book (and yet still had to read three times for various classes in high school and college) exposes me to many more different types of writing that most people ever get exposed to in this day and age. It's hard to feel happy with a compliment from someone whose library consists of Harlequin romances and Dungeons and Dragons tie-in novels -- you almost wish they would say they didn't like it. Of course, no one I know has a reading list that is that bad, but I don't talk to too many people who have read everything from medieval literature to postmodernist novels these days. Even when I was in school, when you are in a writing seminar and everyone there is writing another "slice of life" story about drunk or stoned college kids with crappy love lives, where you just wish everyone involved would drop dead and shut the hell up, it's hard to take them seriously when they talk about how they like what you wrote (or, on the upside, when they say they didn't like what you wrote).
I'm not going to stop reading things like The Shadow of the Wind anytime soon, but I have a real love-hate relationship with them.
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