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[felis_ultharus]

So I finished Lullabies for Little Criminals last night. I won't say it's the best book ever written in English in this country -- and it's not the most profound. But in terms of pure craft, pure structure, and skill with words and imagery -- I think it does win the top spot.

Everyone told me it was brutal and bleak. I don't think these people took English classes in Canada. It's nowhere near the level of bleak this country reaches. Plus, she embroiders the bleakness so wonderfully, too, that the beauty distracts you -- it's like looking at ancient ruins.

"After the bomb, I figured that buttons would be used as currency. Once you traded your buttons for something to eat, you would have to hold your sweater together with your hands. There would be only one lightbulb in town, and you would have to pay dearly to sit underneath it. You would pack your suitcase full of screws that you had managed to find here and there and move to another city in the middle of the night, hoping it hadn't been hit as hard. At the flea market, you would buy a tape of someone screaming at their wife in the apartment next door because you would miss the sounds of ordinary life.

It would be hard to laugh anymore. You would have to pay a prostitute to tickle you and to read to you from a paperback book of jokes. It would be a time for the androids to take over, but they would not have been invented yet. Certain fanatics would volunteer to have their limbs replaced with prosthetic ones.

Before the bomb, your mother embroidered a bird on your pea coat. Once the threads had come undone, there were no more birds. Someone would swear they had seen a sparrow, but everyone would have become a liar."

I also like her description of writing a novel, how it's "kind of like putting together a robot without an instruction manual. Every word is a nut or screw and there are hundreds of thousands of them."

Speaking of which, I finished the most brutal part of my current edit this morning -- where I go over the novel in two-page chunks, tinkering with it and reading it for sound and rhythm, and style. I also revamped the structure, and I think i finally have it right.

Now I'm going to go through and enrich the language and the images a bit more. Then there's one final edit, and a quick read-through. Maybe I'll have this done this year.

Comments

[jenjoou.livejournal.com]

At the flea market, you would buy a tape of someone screaming at their wife in the apartment next door because you would miss the sounds of ordinary life.

I have two reactions to that. 1- that's a very poignant way of expressing how bad things are that you miss even this sort of thing. 2- What kind of world do we live in that this is considered ordinary life?

Maybe I'll have this done this year.

Wow. I look forward to see your book in print. ^_^ (It'll still be a long, long time for me).

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

I think that was the idea -- the world would be that bad.

Well, you'll see it before then, if you're still up for editing. If not, I'll understand.

[urbangeo.livejournal.com]

Check out the A section of today's Gazette. The book and the author are featured in it.

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

Damn, I missed it. But thanks for mentioning it!