Signifying nothing?
Feb. 4th, 2007 06:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
felis_ultharusThe problem with stream-of-consciousness novels is that they tend to produce unconsciousness in their victims readers. It was a little interesting when Gertrude Stein tried it because it was still so new, but the lesson I took away from Stein is that all writing needs to be at least a little contrived because if you reproduce the way people really talk and think, the result is incredibly boring.
I'm muddling through The Sound and the Fury now, and thinking of all the better ways the story could've been written. There are enough hints about what's really going on under the surface of this wealthy Southern family to be interesting, but I really crave a fucking sentence right about now -- you know, subject, object, verb. Period.
This book needed a good mystery writer to pinch-hit for Faulkner -- one who'd present the family's surface, then peel away the layers like an onion. Right now we're getting bits and pieces of the horror in Tourettes-like spasms and it's just not a worthy style.
It's a shame. I really liked Faulkner's Light in August, one of the best novels ever written about racism. It was much better constructed, better crafted, well-built.
I'm muddling through The Sound and the Fury now, and thinking of all the better ways the story could've been written. There are enough hints about what's really going on under the surface of this wealthy Southern family to be interesting, but I really crave a fucking sentence right about now -- you know, subject, object, verb. Period.
This book needed a good mystery writer to pinch-hit for Faulkner -- one who'd present the family's surface, then peel away the layers like an onion. Right now we're getting bits and pieces of the horror in Tourettes-like spasms and it's just not a worthy style.
It's a shame. I really liked Faulkner's Light in August, one of the best novels ever written about racism. It was much better constructed, better crafted, well-built.
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Date: 2007-02-10 06:53 pm (UTC)What's funny about my edition of The Sound and the Fury is that it not only has the big O-for-Oprah logo on the front, but the back-cover blurb begins with a giant O in exactly the same font ("One of the greatest novels of the twentieth century...").
Matt thought it was hilarious that one of the classic texts I read for my comprehensive exam was labelled "The book that re-launched Oprah's book club!"
Sadly, the book by Canadian novelist Douglas Coupland that ended the previous incarnation of Oprah's book club -- because she recommended it before realizing it satirized the kind of talk-show wisdom she's famous for, then temporarily ended the book club -- is not similarly labelled.