Currently reading
Sir Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur: A New Modern English Translation Based on the Winchester Manuscript (Renaissance and Medieval Studies)
Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction
The Human Comedy: Selected Stories
Breaking the Maya Code
The Conquest of New Spain
Jungle of Stone: The True Story of Two Men, Their Extraordinary Journey, and the Discovery of the Lost Civilization of the Maya
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
We
Frankenstein
Beauty Is a Wound
All the Ugly and Wonderful Things: A Novel
While troubling to some, I would call this an unconventional love story. There were certainly moments that made me wince. But that's art's job isn't it? To challenge convention? If one strips away the theme that everyone objects to, what's left is a harrowing story of survival--in the aftermath of a family's implosion. This survival story was successfully accomplished by an appropriate use of all the elements of fiction: The characters were well-rounded, including those I despised; the dialogue was crisp, spare and realistic. The emplotment was multi-perspectival. Occasionally, I grumbled, wanting some other point of view at a particular time. But if one is fair, the chosen perspective was appropriate for that particular time and place. Overshadowing it all was the damaged heroine with more fortitude than ten Penelopes. She becomes the center around whom her reforged family eventually begins to coalesce: Not a cheap happy ending, more of a sigh of relief that those who survived had made it this far.