SansPoint

7 Current Writers Someone Else is in Love With.

Found this post on Zen Habits, a wonderful Lifehacking blog, and thought I should post my own.

1. Haruki Murakami - Let’s not mince words… Murakami is a god among writers. His work continues to amaze me with its clever blend of realism and surrealism, his masterful control of plot, and his ability to make you laugh at one moment, and cringe in fear in the next.

2. David Foster Wallace - His work takes an investment of time, particularly his short fiction, which can be incredibly experimental, but the payoff is worth it. And besides, how many writers can successfully switch between 10-dollar words and phrases like “in the shit”?

3. Thomas Pynchon - Okay, I still haven’t finished Against the Day, but it his previous novels have been amazing stuff. That he’s still producing, and still matching his previous quality^[1] is impressive.

4. Jose Saramago - Sadly, I’ve only read one of his novels, The Double, but it was an experience. His novels look intimidating, with long, sprawling, multi-clause sentences, and traditional demarcations of dialoge.However, the natural, flowing way he writes is easy to settle into. He feels like a traditional storyteller.

5. Don DeLilo - Like Saramago, I’ve only read one of his novels, but I picked the essential: White Noise, which is an amazing piece of literature. No novel I’ve read before, or since, deals with the fear of death and paranoia quite like it. I’m anxious to read his post 9/11 novel, Falling Man.

1. based on the 3/8ths of AtD I read ↩

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I recently got ahold of House of Leaves (part of my reading list for 2008), and have been almost unable to put the damn thing down since I got it. Even without the strange formatting and typography, it would be a captivating read, though the strange formatting certainly adds to the experience, particularly during Expedition #4.

Reading it has me thinking about about multiple narrators and multiple points-of-view. It’s a technique that I’ve been using in my fiction for a while, and something I want to develop. The novel-in-progress I am working on currently switches between a limited first-person perspective with third-person limited perspectives^[1] and the occasional first-person flashback^[2] Multiple narrators and multiple POVs help to expose a reader to alternate sides of a story, providing perspective and exploring situations that affect the main plotline, but are not directly involved by the main character.

What, perhaps, I like best about multiple narrators is the idea of the unreliable narrator, and how an event or situation depicted from multiple perspectives can vary, leaving the true story somewhere in between.^[3] The three main intertwined House of Leaves narratives: that of The Navidson Record itself, Zampanó’s critical essay on The Navidson Record, and Truant’s exploration of Zampanó’s writing and its effect upon his own life all function to provide a different perspective on each individual narrative. They form a cubist structure, augmented by the physical structure of the text, reflecting back upon each other^[4]

I’d love more examples of novels with well done multiple narrators and points-of-view. If you want to make recommendations, leave a comment.

1. i.e. a third-person narrator that only can focus on one character at a time, and explore only that person’s thoughts. ↩
2. My first-person flashbacks are, curiously, in present tense to contrast them with the past tense writing in the main first-person narrative. ↩
3. The canonical example of this is the Japanese short story Rashomon, in which multiple narrators tell their side of a murder story. Natsuo Kirino’s Grotesque does a similar thing in a more modern setting. ↩
4. This reflection sometimes is physical, such as a footnote rendered in mirrored text or blue boxes revealing reversed versions of the text on the previous page, as if a window. ↩

Should Vladimir Nabokov’s last, unpublished, unfinished novel be burned?

>Dmitri’s predicament goes beyond Laura. It’s one that raises the difficult issue of who “owns” a work of art, particularly an unfinished work of art by a dead author who did not want anything but his finished work to become public. Who controls its fate? The dead hand from the grave? Or the eager, perhaps overeager, readers, scholars, and biographers who want to get their hands on it no matter what state it’s in? > Via Metafilter

I’m torn on this one. One the one hand, I’d hate to lose a piece of literary history, but since “the Laura manuscript consists of approximately 50 index cards covered in V.N.’s handwriting” or “some 30 conventional manuscript pages.” I can’t be so certain it’s wrong. If all it needed was editing, and rewriting, I’d say publish it. If it’s in the state it seems to be… burning seems the best option.

Thoughts?

What follows is a chapterette from a longer work. I think it works okay on its own, so I’d like to share.

Picture, if you will, a garden of marble statues. Not a lot of marble statues. I’d say seven. Each statue is a woman I have loved. Specifically loved, not just blindly lusted for. There’s not enough marble in the world for that.

There are seven marble statues. They’re all sized differently. Two are life-size, one is a miniature, about 1:1.5 scale, three are one and a half-times life-size. This leaves one last statue, and it’s a monster. It would be the size of the Colossus at Rhodes. Solid marble.

The size of the statue is equivalent to how madly in love with the woman I was. The ex whose note I found is life-size. If you’re going to picture this one in detail, she’s nude, but covering all the important bits with hair and hands, a bit like the Birth of Venus. She never had hair that long, though. I’m going to claim artistic license.

The 1:1.5 scale statue was my first girlfriend, a high school crush, a prom date. Once I graduated, she went off to school in some part of the country with nice weather and palm trees. We decided it would be easiest to end things rather than try and do the long-distance relationship thing. She didn’t even cheat on me, though I did find out through the grapevine that she started seeing someone else pretty quickly.

The colossus? I’m not ready to tell you about her, yet.

Patience.

There’s no real story to the other statues, save for the standard boy-meets-girl story. We don’t have time, and it would just drag things down.

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Happy Birthday. Your thirteenth is important. Maybe your first really public day. Your thirteenth is the chance for people to recognize that important things are happening to you.

David Foster Wallace’s story collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men was my first introduction to truly experimental short fiction. Wallace dissects, plays with, and reassembles the short story into a variety of bizarre and intriguing compositions that are recognizable as narratives, but turn expectations on their head. Among the most striking examples of this are “Octet,” which takes meta-fiction to an illogical extreme, “The Depressed Person” where the true story is contained in multi-page footnotes, and the series of title stories. By their standards, “Forever Overhead” is amazingly simple and straightforward, yet its surface simplicity belies a clever and impressive command of language and narrative.

The main “trick” of “Forever Overhead” is its use of second-person narrative. The narration is subtle, not speaking to the reader/protagonist you, but about them. Wallace restrains his narration to simple sentences or fragments with one or two images for the majority of the work.

Things have been happening to you for the past half year. You have seven hairs in your left armpit now. Twelve in your right. Hard dangerous spirals of brittle black hair. Crunchy, animal hair. There are now more of the hard curled hairs around your privates than you can count without losing track. Other things. Your voice is rich and scratchy and moves between octaves without any warning.

Yet, he is able to switch this up, moving to complex, flowing writing when appropriate, such as the powerful description of a wet dream.

And dreams. For months there have been dreams like nothing before: moist and busy and distant, full of yielding curves, frantic pistons, warmth and a great falling; and you have awakened through fluttering lids to a rush and a gush and a toe-curling scalp-snapping jolt of a feeling from an inside deeper than you knew you had, spasms of a deep sweet hurt, the streetlights though your window blinds cracking into sharp stars against the black bedroom ceiling, and on you a dense white jam that lisps between legs, trickles and sticks, cools on you, hardens and clears until there is nothing but gnarled knots of pale solid animal hair in the morning shower, and in the wet tangle a clean sweet smell you can’t believe comes from anything you made inside you. This masterful, clever, and deliberate switching of tone and language draws the reader in, grabs their attention and establishes what is to come as important and impactful, as one’s first wet dream.

Even beyond the simple considerations of the language, Wallace’s masterful use of second-person speaks to, and connects with the reader. There is a certain universality of terms, familiarity with the emotions, and the sensations, if not the exact events.

You are in line. Look around. Look bored. Few talk in the line. Everyone seems by himself. Most look at the ladder, look bored. You almost all have crossed arms, chilled by a late dry rising wind on the constellations of blue-clean chlorine beads that cover your backs and shoulders. It seems impossible that everybody could really be this bored.

What thirteen-year old or former thirteen-year old, cannot relate to this?

Even more stunning is the story’s anti-climax, a surprising, intimate look behind a facade of banality. There is something to even a simple story of a birthday visit to a pool, behind a first try at the diving board, and it clicks, it connects with the reader in a way that could not be done through first or third person. This is a narrative that requires the reader to feel there, and be there. No work I have read in second-person before, and none since, has had the same level of impact and connection as “Forever Overhead.” It’s what made me fall in love with David Foster Wallace’s writing, and I hope it does the same for you.