to go on, isn't going as well as i thought it would. When i saw Atonement, by Ian McEwan, in the lib, i had some vague remembrance of, kinda/sorta, wantg to see the movie vers when it had come out in 2007. I think the reason i didn't go & see it then, is prob the same reason i had to chuck it into the Mid-Manhat lib return bin yest: Snore! Didn't i learn my lesson w/ A. S. Byatt's Possession?!
Huge, huge, simply, humongous fan of A.S. Byatt's short stories: Sugar and Other Stories (Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice is exquisitely fantastical, magical?, realism @ it's very best). Matisse Stories? Natch. Through a vague recollect'n of the imagery of fleshy nudity & lush foliage (or i could just have been mixing it up w/ Jane Campion's movie The Piano: Hot!) of the 1995 movie vers of Angels and Insects. I, through the grace of god, had managed to slog through the first novella of that book, Morpho Eugenia, in the spring of this yr. After that fiesta, finishing the second part, Conjugal Angel, was out of the question. Questions of the failed desires & distorted complexity of the human soul? I'm all for it. But the meticulous Victoriana & hypertexuality of Possession was about to drive me to drink (mmmm, prob not a bad idea). Everytime i saw any kind of cursive writg-- an indicat'n of a journal entry--or some kind of long journalistic quotat'n that went on for pgs, i was ready to scratch my eyes out. I just couldn't take the whole thing anymore & eventually just skipped vast sect'ns of text till i got to the, relief, ending.
I swore i would go back and rd The Fairy Melusina (one of the, seemingly, endless passages of poetic text in the book), the obscure epic of the feminist-minded poet Christabel LaMotte. After rdg the ending I was just too happy to be done w/ the book to want to dive back into the minutiae. Sadly, an intellectual i am not. Anyway, it was the A Lamia in the Cevennes story in Elementals... that made me a Byatt admirer. The lamia seemed to be another aspect of the melusine myth. I thought i had a winner w/ Possession. But it seems to be a postmodernist romance more to do with academic & scientific realism; not much my thing.
But i underestimated my complete lack of interest in English, so-called, "drawing rm" fiction. Any of the "classics" that i never rd in my teenage/high school yrs just is not going to get rd. That goes for other post-war British novelists like Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day-- good memories of Anthony Hopkins & Emma Thompson in the movie-- and upper-class old New York chroniclers like Edith Wharton (thank god for books on tape/cd! It was the only way i was going to get through anything by her. Really enjoyed Ethan Frome though-- which i believe was a bit of a departure fr her usu style).
I may have to go back to rdg Atonement at some point because, fr what i've rd, one of McEwan's achievem'ts in the writing of it is his execut'n of the ideas of Metafiction. If you rd Wikipedia's article on metafiction you'll realize that, hey, i'm almost sure to win some kind of lit award w/ this technique! Anyway, i'm now rdg The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini. I didn't have any desire to see the movie, & this book, i know, is going to involve, in scope and subject, so many different levels of heartbreak. Right now, only a few pgs into chap four; it's aight.
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