Posts about literature

Dec172011

The Magic in the Mundane: A Home at the End of the World


Genre fiction offers escape, entertainment, and release from the boring. Reading it, we spend time with vampires and witches, sexy wizards, and complex villains. Genre fiction is often bigger than life, with an almost comic book feel. Regular life, and literary fiction, don’t usually involve the fate of the world.

Instead, the best literary books amplify. They hold a lens up to simple, common experiences, and if written well, encourage us to see them in another light. A good book can take a cliché event, polish it off, and find a new facet we haven’t seen before. That facet, often something universal, strikes a chord with us because it reflects our own lives and experiences.

Michael Cunningham’s a Home at the End of the World is such a book. Transformative, it’s a book that revels in events that could be sentimental but resists painting them with those colors. Four points of view cross and overlap at just the right intervals. Big events in the characters’ lives often occur off screen, between points of view that highlight more important, more intimate moments. What shapes these characters isn’t the death of a parent, at least not by the end. Rather, they grow through the tiniest bit of personal introspection and struggle to explain this to one another.

At its core a Home at the End of the World is dealing with a particular existential malady, one we all feel: the sense that we’re waiting for our lives to start, even as life passes us by. Yet it doesn’t try to remedy this feeling. The characters move through the decades without a resolution until the very end, when Cunningham conjures an ending for them that perfectly reflects much earlier moments while showing us that the characters have truly found a change in their internal landscape.

I read a lot of good books. A Home at the End of the World is a truly great one.

Sep122007

It Broke My Heart: David’s Response to Everything is Illuminated

It’s my goal in the next twelve months to catch up on all of the great books I’ve missed in the last few years while I was focusing solely on reading for my education. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve learned a lot by reading classics and books on writing. I’ve even managed to slip in the occasional young adult novel or fantasy epic in order to keep current with the trends, but the extraordinary amount of time it takes to really read what’s good and bad out there just hasn’t been available.

I took time out this week to read Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated. It’s another wonderful book I wish I’d read years ago. Aside from being the most playful with language and style that I’ve seen in a long while, it’s also the most beautifully written. It’s brief and easily digested in small chapters and I quickly found myself pulling it out of my bag whenever I had ten minutes at the bus stop or five minutes in line at the bank.

What worked for me was the development of character. I really don’t want to ruin anything for you but the characters take their time to reveal their secrets and while you’re waiting on them to give up the goods, you get taken for a ride in the whirlpool history of the fictional village around which everything is centered.

The style is extremely original and you find yourself having to backtrack often as one character edits the writings of another. It’s a bit like As I Lay Dying, which I hate, but without the incredible misery of Faulkner’s classic. Everything made me cry, certainly, but it made me laugh quite a bit too and it’s been a while since a book did that for me.

My critical piece on it will be up on my main site shortly if you’d like a deeper analysis with a bit more fancy vocabulary.

What didn’t work for me: Well, absolutely nothing.

I love this book. It is one of my favorites: instantly and completely. I hope to write a book half this good by the time I die.