Reviewing, reading
The following is a nice, honest piece by Andrew Saikali on the process of reviewing, reading:
This is what happens when I don't take notes. Two months ago, I sat down to read Yesterday's People, a collection of eight short stories by Goran Simic. Born in Bosnia, Simic was already a noted author and poet when he immigrated to Canada ten years ago. I decided to write about these spare, haunting and haunted stories, many of them about life in Sarajevo in the mid 90s. But for reasons that now completely mystify me, I wasn't making notes, which would have been fine had I begun writing this immediately. Two months and three or four novels later, I began to write and I hit a brick wall.
While I remembered the images and the tone of the stories, damned if I could remember any names, or specific details. And the images that I did remember were beginning to blend into each other. I was in a haze. I had been immersed in that world. And then I was out. I had shifted through time and space into other worlds. I was in Jonathan Lethem's Brooklyn, then in Stephen Clarke's contemporary Paris, and most memorably I was amongst Balzac's characters in 1800s Loire Valley, as drunk on his words as I would be if I'd been one of his wine growers in the French countryside. The images of the Bosnian war had been overshadowed. I could never do them justice.
So I began to re-read. I cracked open Simic's collection and dove back in, revisiting the characters, and the horrors of war, and the resourcefulness and resilience of spirit that had moved me the first time.
To read more, click here.
( via The Millions with hat-tip to MetaxuCafe)
This is what happens when I don't take notes. Two months ago, I sat down to read Yesterday's People, a collection of eight short stories by Goran Simic. Born in Bosnia, Simic was already a noted author and poet when he immigrated to Canada ten years ago. I decided to write about these spare, haunting and haunted stories, many of them about life in Sarajevo in the mid 90s. But for reasons that now completely mystify me, I wasn't making notes, which would have been fine had I begun writing this immediately. Two months and three or four novels later, I began to write and I hit a brick wall.
While I remembered the images and the tone of the stories, damned if I could remember any names, or specific details. And the images that I did remember were beginning to blend into each other. I was in a haze. I had been immersed in that world. And then I was out. I had shifted through time and space into other worlds. I was in Jonathan Lethem's Brooklyn, then in Stephen Clarke's contemporary Paris, and most memorably I was amongst Balzac's characters in 1800s Loire Valley, as drunk on his words as I would be if I'd been one of his wine growers in the French countryside. The images of the Bosnian war had been overshadowed. I could never do them justice.
So I began to re-read. I cracked open Simic's collection and dove back in, revisiting the characters, and the horrors of war, and the resourcefulness and resilience of spirit that had moved me the first time.
To read more, click here.
( via The Millions with hat-tip to MetaxuCafe)
posted by Finn Harvor at 12:46 PM
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