Matthew Sharpe’s Jamestown was a wonderful journey through “the idea” of voice. I write “the idea” because the novel can be read as an exploration of that difficult concept and its manifestation in the novel. Jamestown pulls it off beautifully in a space of imagined future and anachronism, where language and its complexity has survived, and since language is still used in this future, voice follows.

But the voices, in some cases, also appear to be translated into the language of the novel. Pocahontas is multilingual and makes frequent reference to English and her native tongue and their differences and similarities. The voice she speaks to the reader is the same voice that she uses with Johnny Rolfe, though mingled in with her voice is a frequent phonetic jumbling of ideas and names, such as Jackshit for Jack Smith.

Regardless, here’s a little thought on Pocahontas:

I am reclining in one of my stilted corn shacks that constitute my diffuse home in this grim passage of my life. There is a vernal crispness in the air that my bosom feels as gloom, and here comes Frank, whose nicknae is Knifeface, and whose face does indeed seem to want to cut your eyeball just for looking at it. Out the back chute of the shack I go, and am running low along the stalks of corn. What the corn thinks of this it won’t say.

. . .

I feel raindrops on my skin and they hurt, not because I’m going through a period of heightened sensitivity but because sometimes when it rains each drop contains a fire that burns the skin. What moments ago was vernal crispness is now shifting over to vernal blur, vernal pain, vernal fear of the fiery rain.

Voice is always in itself, even for the third-person narrator. It calls back what it once said or thought, what it once compared or saw, and reforms it, casts it differently as the ever changing object, changes its mind and its intent or meaning. Persona have memory and all its complications. Pocahontas is vernality. She has and thus is springtime. But she can also concatenate crispness and blur. She can feel crispness as gloom and fear. We go inside her language and follow her, as Pocahontas, through it. Pocahontas is her voice.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind was a fun but over-worded novel. When Daniel, Julian, and Fumero finally meet in the geometric web in the same room, the vectors intersect and the parallels move to climax and the complexity is unwoven. But then clunk.

It wasn’t hard, early on in the novel, to grasp the “burned man’s” identity; this, however, didn’t matter. One of the things that kept me reading was a simple question: why would Julian want to destroy his creative imprint? Thus, the slow, multi-voiced unfolding. Zafón crafts an interesting space, a wet, slick, smoky, and tightly designed and powerfully stratified Barcelona, but I wonder at the end of the novel in light of its concept of parallel narrative and sense of solipsistic interiority. Yes, the mystery of identity and cruelty is solved (we learn from Nuria why Julian would burn his books and why he morphs into Lain Colbert), but the suggestion of a reverberative lack beyond just the solutions (those that Daniel seeks) makes me smile a bit.

In the novel, Julian flees to France, avoiding anger over a relationship with his half-sister, Penelope. He lives most of his life in France ignorant of his son’s and Penelope’s cruel death, all the time hoping for a convergence. This narrative approach (we want to know the consequences of his knowing, which doesn’t necessarily require a linear telling) makes Daniel’s decisions and actions at least interesting enough to follow or reflect upon. Daniel’s innocent actions ripple and effect everyone, including Julian. If I wasn’t in such a good mood (at least a little beyond brooding), I’d argue that Zafon dwells a little much on details that prove ambient but skippable, much like the contents of a Harry Potter novel (I’ve read two, well one and a half, if you don’t count the parts I skipped; make that one then).

Side note: The more I think about Borges’ ideas on story length, the more I agree with him.

Now to finish Andreas.

Carolyn writes:

Now onto a completely different topic: blogs. What’s up with them? Clearly I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I don’t want people to read this thinking I’m some Truman Capote pundit, or worse, a person who thinks they’re a Truman Capote pundit. Yikes. Frankly, no sarcasm here, no one should believe what they read on the internet. There’s some truth, sure, but how can you separate it from the swill? It’s all mixed in. Oh, what does it matter? Blogs are more about opinions loosely based on fact.

We don’t need to cover anything. But we can respond to and examine what we experience. She has already demonstrated a nice range.

And Susan Gibb makes excellent comment on Borges’ Englishman.

A horrible post title but here goes. From McCarthy’s The Road

The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the deep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them like eyes. On the road the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond.

This is one of those breathless examples of writing that McCarthy is so good at putting down in his narrative. This passage is a description of an image outside and behind the major narrative, an image of what the “past” looked like for the Father. The image is so important in the fiction.

I’ve had conversations about nuclear winter, conversations about what major catastrophes might look like, discussions about major losses that may occur in the future on the scale of millenarianism or other end of the current road scenarios. These conversations may or may not have been accurate about the facts and were pretty much speculative. Today, subjects calling on global warming, environmental shifts, and political craziness bring to mind images of change. What would a different future look like? How would institutions change? What if institutions disappeared? McCarthy’s novel avoids these speculative questions by forcing the novel into a small circle of two characters whose world comes and goes in the narrative and whose immediate surroundings are ash, cold, rain, and fear. They have one goal. To reach the coast. After the catastrophe, hope is not the same; there are no goals other than those having to do with survival. But this is a poor summary outside of the experience of the novel itself, where the reader must confront a world similar to Tadeusz Borowski’s in This Way for the Gas. In this world, everything, except for a Father’s love and life for a son and dependence, is flipped and alternate. Compassion cannot be common and the law is gone, destroyed, and not to be brought back in any familiar form. The next block quote is indicative of the novel, plus the impending ending.

The days sloughed past uncounted and uncalendared. Along the interstate in the distance long lines of charred and rusting cars. The raw rims of the wheels sitting in a stiff gray sludge of melted rubber, in blackened rings of wire. The incinerate corpses shrunk to the size of a child and propped on the bare springs of the seats. Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts. They went on. Treading the dead world under like rats on a wheel. The nights dead still and deader black. So cold. They talked hardly at all. He coughed all the time and the boy watched him spitting blood. Slumping along. Filthy, ragged, hopeless. He’d stop and lean on the cart and the boy would go on and then stop and look back and he would raise his weeping eyes and see him standing their in the road looking back at him from some unimaginable future, glowing in that waste like a tabernacle.

I find lots of play with language here: “incinerate” and “itinerate” and the nights are “still” dead. As an aside, I disagree with the use of crozzled. Steaks are crozzled just before they go into the oven for baking. I would imagine that the hearts here are burned all the way through and not just around the edges. But the final sentence is dead on–not because the future is unimaginable for the Father but because he can do nothing at this point to control it, shape it, or guide his son into it. Incredible helplessness.