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bedtime stories for adults
Reading lots of prose poems lately, as short little breaks from Cryptonomicon. The really outstanding volume in the pile is Charles Simic's The World Doesn't End. The narratives arranged here are situated unclearly in time (there are skyscrapers but no computers or even telephones) and occasionally drift into the realm of the fabulous (characters like guardian angels and ambulating dead make appearances)—as a result the book reads something like a collection of children's tales, and it evokes a sense of wonder and potential that I recall deriving from books I read as a child. At the same time, the book is not truly "childlike"—if this is a book of "stories," it is a book of especially ambiguous, open-ended, lyrically dense stories, distinctly more rewarding to the sensibilities of adults than to those of children. I could not wish for a book with a better sense of balance.
Coming soon: more Cryptonomicon. |
Monday, November 10, 2003
11:32 AM
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