Saturday

Do you sometimes read a book and inside your head just read "bla bla bla" ..... ? And then there are others that prompt epiphanies. Moments when you just want the world to be silent so you let it all sink in ... let the quiet little lessons sink in deep. I had one of those with Saturday which was a surprise. We read Enduring Love for a club book and I wasn't so impressed. Yeah it was a lot better than The Bronze Horseman (the bla bla book) which I'm reading now (great beach, holiday read tho!) but still I didn't believe in Enduring Love. Saturday, however is another story. It prompted in me, a break, a chance to stop and look.

I liked the writing ...the couples in each section crossing the square intrigued me - some might have found that extraneous, frivolous, extraneous, not necessary, but I liked it. In some way it kept the structure and slowed the pace, gave a way of locating me as a reader above the story so I could slow down and not be engulfed in his life.

I truly enjoyed the revenge aspect of the story, it's resolution. More than anything though, I liked it's pace, the way it lead me through the big world and the little world of the main character all at the same time. I enjoyed McEwan's journey into the world of ordinary and extraordinary love, life, family and all it's mundanities.

There it is, as I write I see all the complexities in it. A book about life's mundanities - a day - a life. But not. A world of intricacy. Of big questions. Of us walking through this mad world. Gee gosh and golly, wish I could pull a famous quote at this point.

When I was recommended this book, it was suggested that it was a bit of a bloke's book. I'm not quite sure what this means .... Desperately I tried to regain a head full of Iriguay and Lacan and Kristeva and comparative literature and those years of serious questioning .... too late. Too many wines at the conference, too many lost brain cells. All I can do is ask some questions ....
Q 1. Is it blokey because a serious neurosurgeon is the narrator?
Q2, Is it blokey because it asks big serious questions about the world and about war and places the narrator in a traditional masculine role within the family ... and transpose that out to the God role, the Patriarch ...are here it comes all rolling back in. The patriarch, where else do I get to use that word?
Q3. Is it blokey because it's so self centred, that is the narrator is so self centred.

Not a word about my epiphany here ... next meeting perhaps...

Wine Club or Reading Circle or Conversation Club

Found Biddy by the side of the road today on the way to work! We had a pleasant drive to the city together in my supercorrolla. We chatted about the reading circle and all it's intricacies. You know the stuff.... food quality, attendance rates, who's picking this time (not boogers - books!), how you have to get a cleaner in to tidy and sanitise when it's your turn, etc etc. Biddy has just been East and attended ANOTHER bookclub, dare I say it a bookclub sl@#!... no I dare not! We also talked about how we just so nicely (and always lubricated by good - or bad- wine) seem to be able to talk about the book, life, local characters we might have run into ..... and still talk about the book as much as it deserves. Because that's the case isn't it? Some books just don't have a whole lot of conversation starters, others do. The Kite Runner for instance, it was hard NOT to talk about so many different things - the story itself, the cutlure, the writing, the what would have happened if ..., the imagine if had been you ....

Look forward to reading Biddy's story of the OTHER bookclub and the cocroach.

ReadingCircle: Shadow Of the Wind

ReadingCircle: Shadow Of the Wind

Lacuna

Lacuna: a gap or hiatus, as in a manuscript.

This word, or rather lacunae is used in the book. It's a term I remembered vaguely from Lit studies but couldn't figure it out so thought I'd post a few different definitions and links to it....

Macquarie says it's:

"/luh'kyoohnuh, -'kooh-/ noun, plural lacunae /luh'kyoohnee/ or lacunas.
1. a pit or cavity; an interstitial or intercellular space as in plant or animal tissue.
2. Anatomy one of the numerous minute cavities in the substance of bone, supposed to contain nucleate cells.
3. Botany an airspace lying in the midst of the cellular tissue of plants.
4. a gap or hiatus, as in a manuscript."

From Wikkepedia: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lacuna)
"A lacuna is a gap in a manuscript, inscription, text, or a musical work.
The word is Latin for hole or pit. The plural is lacunae. (The word lagoon referring to an empty space of water is cognate.)
The state of old manuscripts or inscriptions which have weathered or been damaged sometimes gives rise to lacunae - passages consisting of a word or words that are missing or illegible. In order to reconstruct the original text, the context is to be considered. In archaeology and literary criticism this may sometimes lead to competing reconstructions and consequent interpretations. "

It refers later to it's use in Linguistics - which I studied so I am assuming that's where I heard it:
Linguistics
"In translation, a lacuna is a lexical gap, a lack of one-to-one equivalence between the word, expression or turn of phrase in the source language and another word, expression or turn of phrase in the target language. This is a factor in untranslatability."

Shadow Of the Wind

I was lying on a couch looking out at the Melbourne city skyline. The line from a song from that gorgeous album Tea & Sympathy kept popping into my head (the very title takes me straight back to the Rosa Brook house, with the slow combustion ticking in the background, grey skies outside, a pot of tea on the warming plate while Peta and I figured it ALL out over a cuppa.) ...wait for it...the line of the song "welcome swallows dip and sway" because there was this flock of maybe 20 black birds that looked so suprisingly big against the sky scrapers. They should have looked smaller but somehow all proportion was lost. And they were dipping and swaying and plummetting madly - just for fun it seemed. Big Melbourne grey clouds like fog moved in from the sea.....

I'm rugged up in one of those Hotel soft fuzzy rugs because the airconditioning was so noisy and I've had 20 million showers because the water pressure is so much better than at home and the bathroom doesn't have ANY mould or chipped tiles and it's a sure way of warming up. The sun was slowly setting as I opened the first page.

It took a big effort to turn to the second ....

What flowery drivel, a thriller, mystery romance with too many adjectives. Where the characters don't seem to have definition and several of them seem to have the same "voice". Ok I admit it's getting (much) better and made for excellent plane reading on the way home. I am looking forward to reading more of it so it's definately got me more interested than the opening chapter did. I'm about a third or half through now and I'm getting a little frustrated I can see the similarities in the character and his life and the book he is "studying" or pursuing might be a better way of saying it. This cross over or seepage from the main narrative to the story within the fictional story is a bit much for my little brain.

Goodness knows I needed a good book on the plane home. Was cramped in next to the window because the woman next to me overflowed onto my side of the arm rest and my seat space. AND the guy in front was a giant so I just coulnd't keep up with "King Kong". Disappointing flight all round really - no good conversation, pretty crappy wine and even the food didn't give me that little adoelscent rush I normally get that comes from associating boarding school food with plane food. Highlights though were flying on top of the clouds that go to the horizon, look so soft and good to walk on!