Tuesday, February 16, 2010

from the Reading Log






Now into Agota Kristof's "The Notebook" and am quite intrigued by the use of 1st person plural as the narrative voice (twin boys). The only other story I've read before employing this device was Gert Hofmann's "Our Conquest" which is a truly masterful novel also from the children's point of view. Anyway, "The Notebook" has me excited after 39 pages.



*****

Am now into the 2nd novel ("The Proof") of Agota Kristof's trilogy having finished "The Notebook". Her writing is very spare, one might say elemental as opposed to simple and I'm enjoying the effortlessness of the way it reads. The story is completely engaging and the central characters, fascinating, and I'm going through this book much faster than usual.

******
Finished "The Proof" and am still really enjoying the good old fashioned page turning drama in these books; drama of the familiar "angst and tragedy at the hands of faceless Communist apparatchiks" Eastern European variety.

*****

Now into the final novel of Kristof's trilogy: "The Third Lie", and am even more impressed with what she does here in undermining the fictive premises governing the events of the first two novels thereby forcing the reader to grapple with a classic post-modern issue: narrative reliability. Really interesting writing here.


*****

Finished the Kristof trilogy. This truly is a masterpiece.

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