In other words, how much of an historical novel is history and how much is literary fiction? And, really, does it matter? And what has Eleanor Sapia Parker done in A Decent Woman (Scarlet River Press, 364 pages)? Continue reading → We know that writers filter reality, compress time, squeeze events, introduce ‘fictional’ aspects to such an extent that often the historical novel masquerades as a “quasi-memoir” splicing together documentation from time past with the writer’s art and craft of invention. There are three dimensions involved: Time, the writer’s mind, and the reader’s perception. What does historical writing demand from the reader in order to “complete a work of art”? As a neuroscientist, Kandel focuses on the plastic arts, but his discussion brings us to the question of writing and specifically to the question of the “historical novel”. Riegel called this phenomenon the “beholder’s involvement.” Kris’s study of ambiguity in visual perception led him to elaborate on Riegel’s insight that the viewer completes a work of art. In The Age of Insight, Eric Kandel writes about the role of the observer in art: “Not only does the viewer collaborate with the artist in transforming a two dimensional likeness on canvas into a three-dimensional depiction of the visual world, the viewer interprets what he or she sees on the canvas in personal terms, thereby adding meaning to the picture. Posted in just literary fiction | Tagged Bildungsroman, lyrical writing style, realism in fiction | Leave a comment Liam’s Going by Michael Joyce
The respectful way my mother pronounced DuBois told me that the man had uplifted the race.” “What I did know about DuBois was that he fell into the category of Famous Black Folk-there was a way people said certain names so that they had an emanation or halo. That neighborhood, made up of Azurest, Sag Harbor Hills, and Nineveh, is geographically and existentially at the center of Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor (Penguin/Random House, 352 pages).Įarly in the novel, the now grown-up narrator Benji recalls his fifteen-year-old self settling into Sag Harbor for the summer of 1985 and contemplates the mythical aura that surrounded some of the people who came before him: Though I spent a not inconsequential portion of my early-twenties leisure time at Bay Street in Sag Harbor, where such reggae luminaries as Steel Pulse, Black Uhuru, Burning Spear, and Lucky Dube frequently performed, I did not know that not far from the concert venue was a neighborhood that had been built by African-American families after World War II. Posted in historical fiction | Tagged character-driven story, interiority in fiction, lyrical writing style, poetic literary fiction | Leave a comment Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead If his narration had a shape it would torus-like, perhaps, or arabesque, but definitely not linear.
And it’s a reading experience that is mind-expanding. Such tricks with time are only possible in literary narrative. Every line is both fraught with Smith’s rich backstory and, at the same time, is nervously peering into his bleak future. Smith’s narration has a reflexivity to it that radically alters the reader’s sense of time. With this volume of historical fiction, Minkoff truly does seem to inhabit the language of those times. Presented as a memoir of Captain John Smith, founder of Jamestown Colony, Virginia in 1607, The Weight of Smoke (McPherson & Co, 389 pages) is the work of a self-described antiquarian, rare books dealer whose imagination is stacked to the ceiling with historic archives and Elizabethan letters. Posted in just literary fiction, science fiction | Tagged disturbing literary fiction, gritty literary fiction, lyrical writing style | Leave a comment The Weight of Smoke by George Robert Minkoff Lyric mastery and a tone of brooding psychic disturbance are the bedrock of the novel, a startling penetration of beauty couched within doom. None of the characters has a name or is “likable” or “relatable,” as the current jargon has it but do not read Kavan for those ends. The plot is episodic, evading conventional patterns. Ice shifts between bleak realism and a haunted panorama of psychological terrors.
Kavan’s prose swerves breathtakingly from the delicate and the brutal. The anti-hero narrator, a man obsessed with a frail, stunning young woman, chronicles the doom he foresees for his world and the girl who is the object of his fascination. Kavan creates a world overrun by vast ice sheets caused by nuclear winter. Published in 1967, Ice (Peter Owen, 158 pages) is a harrowing, oblique, beautiful novel increasingly viewed as a modern classic on par with 1984 and Brave New World.
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