1. How are you supposed to read a novel when you do not even know who is the narrator? Is it Sid? Is it a fish? Is it Gould? Is it Sid telling Gould's story? This makes it really hard to determine the validity of everything that is being said.
2. There are so many layers in this novel it is hard for me to separate them all and determine what happened at what time. The continual flip from the past to the present makes my head spin almost.
3. It is hard to read something when the narrator himself doesn't even know why he is writing it. We talked about this a lot in class where he says on page 46 that he basically does not even know the purpose for this book.
4. Also, I do not see anything special about fish so it is really hard for me to sit here and read this novel and try to determine what the narrator might mean because he clearly has some purpose for talking about all these fish.
We have read all the way up to page 107 and usually by this time a reader is engrossed in a novel and anxious to find out what is going to happen next
This has not happened YET at least not for me...the novel is still boring and confusing. Hopefully by the next section something exciting will happen or at least some explanation. As you can tell I am very frustrated with this crazy book! I would rather be reading more Jane Austen :)
I'm totally with you in that I would much rather be reading a Jane Austen novel. And I really dislike this novel, too, but I feel bad for saying that because I know I need to give it a chance. One of Matt's comments on Ryan's blog said that this book was obviously written for some reason- it's not just a pointless collection of words. I agree. I have yet to figure out what the purpose of this book is and, like you, I'm frustrated with it and am having a hard time remembering all of the details and seeing how they relate, but I think there is still some hope for it coming together. We've read almost 150 pages now, but that's still not even half the book.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I think that if I was more open to the idea that this book really incorporates magical realism, I may like it a little better. With that, I may be able to accept its strangeness a little more. But, I have such a hard time not taking it at face value. I guess it's a process. I hope it gets better. For Kelly's sake. I feel bad for being so frustrated with a book that she obviously really cares about.
I think there are two things I've done that have helped me to not get frustrated with this book:
ReplyDelete1. I've tried to accept that if I'm confused about something, if something is unclear, or if I feel like two theories about a certain aspect of the book are equally possible (ie narration) that it isn't because I don't get something, but because these are questions we are supposed to have. If you were reading Weiland, for example, and didn't know who was narrating, that would be a problem, because Brockden Brown didn't want that to be unclear. Flanagan, on the other hand, wanted that to be a question that his readers ask. We aren't asking it because we don't get the book, we're asking it because we do.
2. In a book like this, there are way too many allusions, symbols, etc. to keep up with all of them. I guarantee that anyone, no matter how good they are at literary analysis, could read this book 5 times and still get something completely new out of it on the 6th. So, since we won't be able to pick up on everything, rather than trying to spread ourselves so thin, we should choose certain themes, allusions, etc. that we understand or are interested by the most, and follow those as far as they'll take us. That doesn't mean we should ignore the other parts of the book, but I do think that a narrow and deep analysis is better than a broad and shallow one. Maybe a broad and deep one is best, but I think it's also impossible.