Summer Reading, Part 2

Finished "I, the Divine" by Rabih Alameddine last weekend . An aborted fictional memoir, written entirely in half-finished first chapters, "I, the Divine" is an impressive a technical feat. Some immediate thoughts: It works. Kinda. The novel is less like a traditional linear novel (duh), and more like a series of vingettes, of little windows into the narrator's life. As a character examination, it works fantastically. I really came to know the protagonist, Sarah Nour El-Din, inside and out; her ticks, her habits, her values. And by sharing all of Sarah's attempts at writing, you get a great sense of her personal voice and, just as importantly, her writing voice. She experiments with tone, with voice, with POV over the course of three hundred pages. She contradicts her facts from one chapter to the next -- some not important, some quite important -- and in doing so, reveals how truth-bending writing, even in memoirs, must and can be to best serve a story. And certainly, what may be true in one window -- Sarah's utter disdain for her stepmother as a child -- may be fanciful, even false in another, when Sarah's relationship with her stepmother as an adult looking back on her youthful ways can be best described as warm, even loving. The truth, as it is in writing, is never just one thing, and constantly it shifts and moves throughout "I, the Divine."

While the varying perspectives, voices, and small views into the life of Sarah Nour El-Din is its greatest strength, it is also its greatest weakness. Like I briefly mentioned in my last post, "I, the Divine" reads less like a novel and more like a collection of non-linear, but connected short stories. The problem with this? The stories, while individually wonderful, and occasionally beautiful, lack the same tension and emotional punch that you'd get from reading the end of "Catcher in the Rye" or "The Road." That's not to say that nothing happens, quite the contrary, there are probably more unique things that occur in this novel than most -- we learn so much about Sarah and her father, her mother, her stepmother, her son, her two ex-husbands, and all her sisters in an incredibly short amount of time. The problem is, at least to me, is that the information, while plentiful, doesn't build the same way a linear novel would, doesn't layer its scenes on top of another with increasing emotional stakes. Instead, the reader gets one chapter with Sarah as a young girl in Lebanon, fighting her stepmother, and in the next chapter, Sarah as an adult in San Francisco sleeping with a new lover. At its best, this kind of skipping narrative is fascinating, but at its weakest, it's unfortunately jarring.

Next on my reading list is a little bit of "me" time. I'm going to re-read "Dune," one of my all time favorite science fiction books of my youth. Will it hold up? Approximately twenty pages in, I can already say both yes and no. Yes, because I'm already reinfatuated (is that even a word?) with the book. It really brings back so many memories of what I used to viscerally love about science fiction: ideas, technology, and an wonderfully richly crafted universe. Plus, things happen and things blow up! On the other hand, reading it as an adult and not a teenager, I can already see some of the "flaws" so stereotypically associated with genre fiction. Flat, utilitarian writing and an omniscient voice that occasionally verves into the obvious. Not necessarily poor writing, but certainly not the crackling, tight voices and narratives that I've become so accustomed to over the past few years. In short, it is writing that takes a back seat to story, and not the other way around.

Work, etc.

The thing about work is that it sucks. Having to spend eight hours a day (plus one hour for lunch, one to two hours for commute) is a huge time drain, and typically only leaves me four-five hours of "free" time outside of work. This is a problem, a problem that is exacerbated by the fact that I have so much to prepare for in anticipation of moving and getting ready for grad school. That's my long-winded excuse for not tending to this blog more often in the past couple weeks. On the bright side, I'm quitting the old job in less than a month, and will have much more time to write interesting posts on storytelling in video games and the like. Boy do I know my audience.

Right now I'm reading I, the Divine by Rabih Alameddine for my upcoming craft class. The unique thing about this book is that it is a kind of aborted memoir written entirely in first chapters by the protagonist, Sarah Nour El-Din. About 50 pages in, I can immediately see the advantages to this technique. Since opening sections of novels typically rely more on summary and swaths of "telling" prose, Alameddine is able to convey a huge amount of information in relatively short amount of space. He also manages to cheat in actual scenes of dialogue and action by setting them up with very short, yet grand sweeping paragraphs of summary and general statements of fact. The character begins one chapter: "I realized when it came to men, I did not pick the beautiful or the correct. I picked the wrong one. I chose David," which then transitions wonderfully into a very specific scene. What I am curious about is how tension and pacing will be handled through 300 pages of this style. It is more akin to reading a collection of closely linked short stories than a linear book. Will the constant temporal jumping from random scene to random scene get old by page 250 without sufficient build up? I hope not. Right now it's a very good read, and I'm interested in how Alameddine will handle these problems later on.