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Gentle reader4/16/2023 By flaws, I mean style tics, typos, and minor errors that are no longer seem to be editted. I think when a story and characters engage me, I am fairly forgiving of flaws and just keep reading past them. I certainly get pulled out of books more now that I've gained experience in critiquing. I want the story to be about the characters, not the writer (unless it is an autobiography). It's actually all about me." Maybe that's what he wanted me to be thinking, but that's not my style as a reader or a writer. The whole time I was reading it, James Joyce was right there in my face saying, "See what I'm doing? The literary device is the thing, not the characters. *Shudder* I know old James had a perfectly legitimate reason for writing an entire chapter with no periods (and I respect that), but reading something like that just drives me crazy. If you want to give me a headache borne of pure annoyance, just hand me the last chapter of Ulysses. I expect to see that sort of thing when I read a journal forum like this (a place where things are written quickly and informally and not thorougly revised), but not in a book. That's fine in dialogue, if it's appropriate to the character, but narration that is littered with these things just annoys me. My personal pet peeve is clumsy writing (bad grammar, awkward sentence construction, misused or missing punctuation, etc.). I read Pamuk's Black Book in 2003, but I can't remember it well enough to recall if that device was there. I can understand how the kind of directness you've described above could be kind of strange, though, although I don't recall having encountered this device. I also enjoy third person narration that comes across as storytelling. I love first-person narration in which a character speaks directly to the reader as if he/she were actually sitting across from you, telling you the story. In any case, I take the long way in agreeing with prestoimp, above. Abigail Thomas, in one of the more beautiful books I've read in recent years - Safekeeping - used these direct appeals to anchor an otherwise complex poetic narrative firmly in the real (if you've read it, note the narrators phone conversations with her sister). When done well, those little breaks in the third wall feel intimate. If anything, I appreciate the device (the conceit? the effect?) when it's used well, because it feels more honest to me (tho it can be sneaky and sly, too). So it's not particularly jarring for me to be reminded that there is an author behind this work, an author making deliberate choices in service to the story, to the ideas, and to the reader. Maybe it's my limitation as a reader, but as I read, I'm always looking for the scaffolding underneath the art. Perhaps because Ondaatje hails from others literary worlds, poetry and nonfiction, he's not so invested in the aesthetics of naturalism. I don't have a copy handy, but I recall Michael Ondaatje using this technique in some of his work (I'm thinking of In the Skin of a Lion and also The English Patient, neither of which I have on hand, so I'm sorry to say I can't quote, but I think he took a light hand with it) and I think he does so to great effect. When you're reading, what forces you out of the story and makes you remember that you're reading a book? But for the moment it's just an obstacle between me and full immersion in the book.Īll of which leads (via a maddeningly circuitous route) to my Gentle Reader Question of the Day: Certainly I felt that way about the narrator in The Life of Pi, who seemed to add nothing to the story-until I reached the final dazzling chapter and realized it couldn't have been written any other way. Perhaps the reason for this device will become clear later in the book perhaps I'll even come to believe the story required it. While not uncommon in Victorian novels, this "Gentle Reader" technique is rare in modern fiction. "We'll have a lot to say about melancholy later on."."Let us take advantage of this lull to whisper a few biographical details."."We should note straightaway that this soft, downy beauty of a coat would cause him shame and disquiet during the days he was to spend in Kars, while also furnishing a sense of security.".I haven't read enough yet to form an opinion of the novel, but in the opening chapter I've found myself jolted out of the story by a literary device not often used today: speaking directly to the reader. I'm reading Orhan Pamuk's Snow, the story of an exiled poet returning to Istanbul after a long absence.
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