How Fiction Works review É 103

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How Fiction Works review É 103 ¿ ❤ How Fiction Works pdf ⚣ Author James Wood – Gwairsoft.co.uk In the tradition of E M Forster's Aspects of the Novel and Milan Kundera's The Art of the Novel How Fiction Works is a scintillating study of the magic of fiction an analysis of its main elements and In the tradition of E M Forster's AspIn the tradition of E M Forster's Aspects of the How Fiction PDFEPUBNovel and Milan Kundera's The Art of the Novel How Fiction Works is a scintillating study of the magic of fiction an analysis of its main elements and a celebration of its lasting power Here one of the most prominent and stylish critics of our. For 75 pages this was all clang clang clang goes the trolley ding ding ding goes the bell but then it turned a sharp corner and I think I done got throwed off the bus Ow As it rattled off without me I was left to think carefully about what I’m doing when I read a novel aside from avoiding the interminable election debates on tv OMG another 3 weeks to go and what I think a novel is doing or supposed to be doing It’s good to be made to think about these things But why did I get throwed off the busThis jampacked little book is all about the why of novels and it's got some high standards to apply to both novels and readers so you better shape up you readers you Hey I do mean YOU Yeah That's rightIt’s like James Wood expects us to be listening to some random tune and be able to name the bass player and the producer’s previous hits and the singer’s favourite drugs and where it got to in the charts and its relation to the minor essays of Jean Paul Sartre and Flaubert’s left earlobeJames Wood is like the gold standard reader When you read David Foster Wallace you notice that he notices everything I mean everything and notices everything about himself noticing things and so on and so forth James Wood does all that while he reads every single novel Not one word passes casually beneath the Wood eyeballs Every phrase will be cross examined Every paragraph will have bamboo shoved up its fingernails until it confesses where it stands in regard to Stendahl Balzac and Dostoyevsky And Flaubert Frankly I was outclassed I was than a little crushed I was talked down to It had been made clear that I'd got on the wrong bus Me Moi As the trolley lurched round another bend I was turning distinctly green It was all going so well when JW was discussing the free indirect style of modern narration which enables an indeterminate locus of reality to emerge which is not the character speaking and not the author either but a fifth dimension euipoised between the two All that was great But then he gets in to character a brief history of consciousness and sympathy and complexity Then the full florid obsessions emerged – no 20th century only French and Russians Balzac More Flaubert Pushkin Stendahl Diderot Chekhov Tolstoy Yeah that’s right punk All those guys you never read You were going to get round to them but well I don’t know but you just never did Well I bet you’re regretting that now because you can’t talk about fiction without an intimate knowledge of alla those guys Sorry I bet you want to slink off back into the night now donchaGo ahead slinkWhen the 20th century is reluctantly allowed into JW’s purview it’s Hardy never read him Buddenbrooks never read it Proust same Italo Svevo huh Thomas Pynchon no thanks and Saul Bellow oh I read one by him – the wrong one It must be said out loud James Wood is an old school patrician sneerer Even though he’s earned the right to sneer a hundred times over there’s still no need for it Here’s where I gagged If prose is to be written as well as poetry novelists and readers must develop their own third ears We have to read musically testing the rhythm of a sentence listening for the almost inaudible rustle of historical association clinging to the hems of modern words attending to patterns repetitions echoes deciding whether a metaphor is successful and another is not judging how the perfect placement of the right verb or adjective seals a sentence with mathematical finality We must proceed on the assumption that almost all prose popularly acclaimed as beautiful “she writes like an angel” is nothing of the sort that almost every novelist will at some point be baselessly acclaimed for writing “beautifully” as almost all flowers are at some point acclaimed for smelling niceIs this not a bit nauseating Get off of your high horse JW Maybe there are 41 other human beings who read the right books with the perfect superconsciousness using their perfect brains bulging with culture in the way that JW advises but the rest of us are real people who sometimes read in the bath with the radio on Some of us have actually not read Flaubert’s Sentimental Education Think of that Some of us – you may have to lie down for this – have no intention of reading Flaubert’s Sentimental Education We are the plebs your culture warned you about However at the end of this book we get 20 pages about realism Here James Wood defends the idea that the business of fiction is to get real life in some way onto the printed page Suddenly James Wood is my new best friend Yes It’s about time someone stuck it to those old haddocks William Gass and Roland Barthes I love this Realism seem broadly as truthfulness to the way things are cannot be mere verisimilitude cannot be mere lifelikeness or lifesameness but what I call lifeness life on the page life brought to different life by the highest artistry And it cannot be a genre; instead it makes the forms of fiction seem like genres For realism of this kind is the origin It teaches everyone else; it schools its truantsSo – what can I say – read the first 75 pages and the last 20 and don’t mess with Mr In Between We cannot write about rhythm and not refer to Flaubert and so once again as if unable to stop rereading the old letters of a former lover I return to him Ugh