Writing and Publishing Fiction

All the Starring Characters in Lost

I decided to try a novel approach to a book reviews, and write a review of the reviews of the book before I have completed reading the book. Why would I do that? Do a Google search on "book reviews [novel title]," and you will find many reviews by Amazon.com reviewers and other bloggers. You could consider it a collaborative review of sorts, where different opinions build on each other, rather than another rambling, unrelenting, self-involved soliliquy. By sticking to the first 3/5 of the book, I can reduce the chance that I will spoil the novel for others that might wish to read it—although The Unconsoled is not a novel that I would expect to end with a lot of clarity. As the title of this post states, I am going to give the 3/5 review of reviews treatment to The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro. (Hopefully, I have done more justice to his name than I did for poor Nabakov Nabokov. Since most of the reviews are lengthy, I will simply take snippets with links to the larger articles. (Unfortunately, I accessed several of the articles through a free trial with highbeam.com, so it is a bit of work to get at the full articles.

Some novels are rumored to be too dense, arcane, or pretentious to be read in their entirety. Those sorts of novels are my specialty, and I have been emboldened to complete five such novels from beginning to end: 100 Years of Solitude, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Foucault's Pendulum, Moby Dick, The Tunnel.

The Italo Calvino novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler, opened me up to a completely different type of story-telling. First, the story is written in the second person point of view. You know the second person, that point of view you are warned not even to try, because it is nearly impossible to make it work, but every writer at some point tries anyway. Well, Calvino pulls it off. How?

The knock against second person is that the writer doesn’t know anything about the reader, so how can the writer pretend to know how the reader would think or feel any of things that the writer assigns to the second person character. In this case the bridge is made by identifying with the reader as a reader and nothing else, simply someone who is beginning to read a Italo Calvino’s book, If on a winter’s night a traveler.