Wednesday, February 10, 2010

As some have already pointed out, this book was hard to read through. It wasn't that it was wan't engaging but more because of a lack of narrative. Each page was an isolated piece of writing with no sense of story to connect them and therefore nothing to carry me on to the next page. On top of this, many of the entries themselves felt incomplete, only fragmented ideas with no clear resolution. Even now, nothing really sticks to my mind about the book because I cannot remember it as a story but as about one hundred scattered thoughts.

I'm not criticizing the book because this may well have been the intention. In fact, I rather like the structure of the book. Even though there is no concrete narrative, there is a sense of continuation. Each page is a day in the author's life and perhaps this is a reflection of how life doesn't have a narrative flow, that it is mostly made of fragmented thoughts and feelings, that it does take pains to go through it just like the pages in the book. To me, it seemed that the book tried to deconstruct the idea of a story and present one that is continuous, trapped in an endless string of days with no specific beginning and ending, as life is.

4 comments:

  1. Your insight on Little Book of Days was fascinating. You definitely lent a new lens for me to look at the novel through. Do you think you would have preferred the novel with a concrete narrative? Is the continuous narrative a positive or negative contribution?

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  2. I'm very pleased you said something about the fact that nothing in this book was memorable. That was the first thing I came to realize five minutes after I finished it. My critical review of "Little Book of Days" would have been very similar had I chosen to write one.

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  3. Spot on. I agree that it was hard to read through. What I liked was that it didn't leave me convinced of anything. There were details and insights, but it was all take it or leave it. In some ways I think that is similar to life.

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  4. This book seems like it really is just dying to be spaced out. Unfortuneately, with a classroom setting we only had a week to take all of her writing in. Interesting view on how she tries to deconstruct the idea of story.

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