nik9000

I just finished Prophet Song and loved it but I want to rant about the second sentence. Here are the first three:

The night has come and she has not heard the knocking, standing at the window looking out onto the garden. How the dark gathers without sound the cherry trees. It gathers the last of the leaves and the leaves do not resist the dark but accept the dark in whisper.

The first sentence is great. Introduces the setting and the tone and tells the reader, "I'm about to play with standard grammar."

The third sentence is, like, one of thesis statements for the book. Lovely imagery. I wouldn't have written it that way but I'm not a poet and I'm sure there's some meter I'm missing.

But the second sentence is clunky. It reads like he forgot a word. He didn't. If you read it as "How the dark gathers, without sound, the cherry trees." then it's fine. It links to the next sentence. But I read it as "How the dark gathers without sound the cherry trees."

I ran an informal servey at a board game night and no thought this was a sentence. They did not understand.

So here's where my rant begins: he knew I'd do that. He demonstrates profound ability to control how you read. And he absolutely can write grammatically illegal sentences that are super readable and compelling. He's good at this shit.

He goes back to the cherry trees over and over again in the book and it's comforting to check back in on the tree metaphor. It's a wonderful, comforting metaphor for suffering. You get to high five it a bunch of times during the book. It's important you remember the trees.

And I sure did! Because of that clunky second sentence I showed my friends. My wife said, "only a white guy would dare write like this." And, I dunno about only but his choices do scream, "I'm a pretentious Irish poet and this is Literary Literature."

He knows people are going to say, "this dude wishes he was Joyce" and "he sure ain't Cormac McCarthy." Again, he's good at this shit. I think he wanted to do a Literary Literature about refugees.

Back to cherry trees. I think he chose to make that sentence flow so badly that it stuck in your craw so you'd remember the stupid trees. Talk about them. I think this is a thing Literary types like to do. To put ideas in your head using these fun meta tricks.

And it worked! I'm talking about the damn trees. And if you read the book and are reading this you are being reminded of the trees and the peotic thesis. I think this is intentional. You don't risk the second sentence of your book being clunky unless you know what'll happen.

But was it worth it? I almost put the book down. I've never read this dude before. I almost gave it back to the library on page three when I realized he wasn't doing paragraphs. I'm ok without quotation marks. Didn't bother me.

I read an interview where he said he felt like Europeas just weren't getting the refugee crisis. I've seen people criticize him to telling this story in Ireland or telling a fictional story when so many real life stories happened in the 30s. And much more recently in Eastern Europe. But I don't buy that criticism. He's correct that Europeans don't get it. Well, I know Americans don't because I'm here and ICE and shit. But I've seen some y'all's media and it sure looks like you are in the same boat as us.

Whatever. He may as well give it a shot. If tarting it up with metaphor and Literary Literature gets the message out then great.

But if you want to get the message out then why risk the clunky second sentence? Is it not clunky to Literary Literature types?! If it isn't clunky then I'd have expected him spend another sentence or two of the trees. Can't high five a metaphor you forgot.

So I think this is intentionally clunky. And it does help me remember the tree metaphor. But maybe it does more? I certainly showed it to a bunch of folks. But the lack of paragraph breaks dominate the conversation and he had to know it would. He's good at this shit.

Ideas? I'm obviously overreacting. But this is an important choice! One that I don't understand. I don't understand lots of stuff and it doesn't usually bother me. Why does this sentence bother me?

Could you explain literacy fiction? I come from scifi/fantasy land and am confused.

There's this definition that feels like "genre fiction has some recognizable theme/trope/rule/setting/whatever. Literary fiction is just the stuff that doesn't fit easily." I guess that's a fine definition. Useful! Though I think my library just calls that "fiction" or "general fiction".

But there's this other "literature makes you think" definition. That's the definition I feel like people mean when they say the word with reverence. There's some "genre is popcorn and literature is vegetables" there too. Genre is of plot driven literature character driver. Literature examines the human condition and has complex story structure.

So, like, Use of Weapons and Chasm City are just about the most scifi books to ever scifi. I'm not as into war fiction, but Catch 22 counts, right? They use they're complex narrative structure to make you feel a way. In service of their examination of war/time/identity. I dunno. Slaughterhouse Five leans on scifi to process war.

Never Let Me Go uses it's simple structure and scifi tropes to examine a very complex theme. That book is not candy.

Ender's Game taught me more about empathy than religion ever managed to.

There is certainly plot driven scifi with not great characters that's super duper scifi. Three Body Problem, 2001, Childhood's End. I don't tend to like those as much. But they sure have things to say about the human condition.

We're living in some terrible mashup of Snowcrash, The Diamond Age, Neuromancer, and The Fifth Season. And they wrote those books because they saw it coming. Or wanted to explain that I was already here. Hell, there's even the classic "we built the torment nexus from the classic book don't build the torment nexus" meme.

I'm just.... What even is literature?