week two.
I now realized that James Woods is a literary God. He is considered "the best literary critic of his generation," and he is staff writer at the New Yorker. When I picked "How Fiction Works" as the second book of the year, I didn't know him and I didn't know what this book was really about.
Through its pages I felt like I was attending one of those classes where the teacher is everything we want him to be, even snobbish and petulant.
I enjoyed it and learned a lot, much more than I had anticipated.
the three languages.
Mr. Wood talks about the languages of a novelist; the author's own language, the character's language and the language of the world. (newspapers, advertising, blogs and text messaging)
and speaks of a novelist as a triple writer.
What I liked about this is realizing the 3 voices coming together in one, the writer. The intimacy of our own realizations give room to our artistic/philosophical/professional voice. Its this intimacy that we must encourage. Its deep but its a deep realization.
room for Flaubert?
... His narration favors the telling and brilliant detail, knows how to withdraw from superfluous commentary, judges good and bad neutrally, seeks out the truth even if its repelling, and the author's 'fingerprints are traceable but not visible". This describes how deep and brilliant the style of the french writer is. Impersonal prose. Where an author is like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.
I love when I'm given tools to be able to appreciate brilliance.
optical zoom.
Mr. Wood says; we are like helpless cameras. We have a wide lens and must take in whatever comes before us. Our memory selects for us, but not he way literary narration selects... our memories are aesthetically untalented.
In a way, a writer can zoom in and out at will. we in life use detail to recall, to navigate. But, whereas life is full of detail we barely notice, literature teaches us to notice, which makes us better readers of detail in literature, which in turn makes us better readers of life. funny how you get better noticing as one gets older. I find this fascinating... we select to notice the things we choose to notice, writing by our own will, our own dramas, comedies, in prose or poetry.
their insignificance is precisely their significance.
there is no such thing as irrelevant detail in fiction. It made think of how quickly we file the most ordinary moments in life as boring when in fact, they might very well be a preface for our finest, most extraordinary times.
we begin in misplaced certainty and end in placeless mystery.
I can relate to this point. How many times we see people riding the subway, at the airport or simply at the store and we immediately figure them out; our "misplaced certainty" only gives itself to mystery. Because we all are fictional works that revealed ourselves to us and to others, minute by minute, with unintentional suspense.
3 layers of a character
first is the announced motive. Second is the unconscious motivation. the third is beyond explanation. Many pages are written explaining our favorite characters from books and films, and in every case, the 3 layers will appear, making the fictional real, and the real to look more like fiction.
our social personality is a creation of the thoughts of other people.
Proust said this. I don't disagree with him.
sympathy
three aspects of of the experience of reading fiction; language, the world and the extension of our sympathies toward other selves.
This is perhaps the pages of the book that I enjoyed the most. When Wood swims between works dissecting language and intentions, adjectives and metaphors. its feels like one is finally able to savor a good wine, not just drink it.
a witty essay
in the Condemned Playground Cyril Connolly wrote a criticism of conventions in novels. I am tempted to create such a list for "conventions" in advertising... conventions so rusted, that nothing moves.
Fiction
Fiction does not ask us to believe something, in a philosofical sense, but to imagine them, in an artistic sense.
I can't capture all the interesting thoughts and ideas that Wood explores in the last pages of the book. I have to admit that I loved the book, Wood's ideas and his knowledge of classic works of literature.
At the end, I think that I put the book down with a better understanding of a character and language. I couldn't ask more from a book.
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