We Need to Talk About Epistolary Books

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Book, Book review, Books, Epistolary novel, Eva, Frankenstein, Franklin, Kevin, Language, We Need to Talk About Kevin, Writing

Having recently finished We Need to Talk About Kevin, I’ve been thinking about epistolary books.

An epistolary book is one made up of letters: the beginning of Frankenstein, for example, or We Need to Talk About Kevin.

They present a bit of a conundrum for me. For instance, this excerpt here seems a bit silly:

That night you were furious.

“So a little girl scratched herself. What has that to do with my son?”

“He was there! This poor girl, flaying herself alive, and he did nothing.”

“He’s not her minder, Eva, he’s one of the kids!”

“He could have called someone, couldn’t he? Before it went so far?” “Maybe, but he’s not even six until next month. You can’t expect him to be that resourceful or even to recognize what’s ‘too far’ when all she’s doing is scratching. None of which remotely explains why you let Kevin squish around the house, all afternoon from the looks of him, plastered in shit!” A rare slip. You forgot to say poop.

“It’s thanks to Kevin that Kevin’s diapers stink because it’s thanks to Kevin that he wears diapers at all.” Bathed by his outraged father, Kevin was in his room, but I was aware of the fact that my voice carried. “Franklin, I’m at my wit’s end! I bought all those there’s-nothing-dirty-about-poo how-to books and now he thinks they’re stupid because they’re written for two-year-olds. We’re supposed to wait until he’s interested, but he’s not, Franklin! Why should he be when Mother will always clean it up? How long are we going to let this go on, until he’s in college?”

“Okay, I accept we’re in a positive reinforcement loop. It gets him attention — “

“We’re not in a loop but a war, Franklin. And our troops are decimated. We’re short on ammunition. Our borders are overrun.”

 Having been married to Eva, having been there when this conversation happened, why would Franklin need to be told this much detail?

Of course, it turns out that the letters were more therapeutic than communicational, so this detail may have been for Eva, but it highlights an issue with epistolary books: namely, the reader.

The unacknowledged, unspeaking audience to whom the whole book is addressed presents an issue for the writer. We, as readers, know nothing of the history of the people writing to one another. To write normally, omitting the details we need to know to build up a full picture, would be to exclude the very people the book is written for. But the write letters filled with details which would be, if the book were non-fiction, comical, make it seem patronising and slightly unrealistic.

Is there a middle ground? Are then any epistolary books which manage to get the balance just right?

 

When Is a Book Not a Book?

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Book, E-book, Fiction, Literature, Reading, Writing

Music travels from vinyl to cd to downloads. Videos that once had to be fast-forwarded through adverts and rewound back to the start can now be on your screen at the push of a button.

Alongside technological advances, there seems to be a strange reminiscence or nostalgia, as if these new advancing technologies are always harking back to their ancestors.

The save button is a floppy disk. Phone cases that look like tape players.

Books started off, not as books but as scrolls. Even the text was different, as it was written by scribes, who only marked where they would pause for breath when it was to be read aloud again. The nature of scrolls meant it often had to be read in one, long go, as if you stopped, you lost your place.

Do I Dare Disturb the Universe?

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Eliot, Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Modernist Literature, Philosophy, Poem, Poetry, TS Eliot

For me, T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock epitomises why I love – and am able to look past the propensity for pretension and drama of – Modernist Literature.

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky,

Like a patient etherised upon a table;

It has an aspect of lethargy to it, which seems to capture the essence of a city at dusk. Personifying the city and its streets to be ‘muttering’, or likening them to an argument, it has an aggressive laziness to the opening.

To the Only Good Dad in Literature!

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Atticus Finch, Book, Father, Father's day, Jane Eyre, King Lear, Series of Unfortunate Events, To Kill a Mockingbird

Dads, I realised as I sat down to write this post, are not well represented in literature.

Firstly, literature has an overwhelming number of orphaned children (Jane Eyre, A Series of Unfortunate Events, Great Expectations, Harry Potter), or otherwise absent fathers (Narnia).

Even ignoring these father figures, we are faced with a plethora of dads who frankly fail in their positions as parents. Woolf’s To the Lighthouse sees a strange, manic father who embarrasses his children – and was based upon Woolf’s own father. In Wharton’s The Custom of the Country we see Undine’s doting father unwittingly help to turn his daughter into the shallow, materialistic, morally corrupt woman we see at the end of the novel. Do not even get me started on Lord Asriel in His Dark Materials.

Blogging About Books

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Book, Literature, Reading

Reading is an amazing thing. Every book every written is made up of the same 26 letters and a small number of punctuation marks, and yet each touches us in a different way. We lose ourselves in books, allow our minds to be transported, come to know the characters as dear friends. 

Reading allows an escape in a way few other things can, because it allows respite from this world; it allows us to escape for the time that book is in our hands. Thought provoking, emotional, completely engrossing, books are so important.

 

Which is why it’s difficult to write blog posts on books.

Books Can Transcend Gender

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Book, Books, Dan Brown, Fiction, George Orwell, Great Gatsby, Jodi Picoult, John Steinbeck, Kate Atkinson, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Of Mice and Men, Orwell, To Kill a Mockingbird, Zadie Smith

I recently checked out the Book Swap shelves in my work, and saw On Beauty by Zadie Smith. It’s a book I’ve always wanted to read, but have never gotten around to reading. So, I picked it up.

A colleague of mine read the blurb, out of interest, and came to the conclusion that, “it looks good; just a bit too girlie for me”.

Pink? Must by for girls.

Stop right there.

When it comes to good fiction, there’s no such thing as ‘girlie’. Yes, some authors aim their writing towards men (Lee Childs, Dan Brown) and some at women (Jodi Picoult, Maeve Binchie). But then you get past the take-your-brain-out trashy fiction (don’t lie, you know they are), books transcend gender.

Anchoritic Texts

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Book, Book review, Books, Christ, Christianity, Crucifixion of Jesus, England, English Language, Etymology, God, Julian, Julian of Norwich, Middle English, Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, The Passion

This is a Texty Tuesdays post, looking at different types of text from the printed word to blogs to things you scribble when you’re bored.

Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love did something no other piece of medieval literature has done to me. It stirred up a lot of emotion in me; I had, I’ll admit, a lump in my throat.

When she was young, Julian of Norwich prayed to God for a vision. She wanted more knowledge of the suffering of Christ; to know how those closest to him felt, watching him dying on the cross. She wanted to think she was dying, for everyone to think she was dying, so that she had no reason to think she would live any longer; but to not actually die.

At the age of thirty-something, her prayer was answered. She suffers a fever; can’t move, can’t speak; can hardly breath. At one point, her mother closes her eyes, thinking she’s dead.

A priest and a young boy from the town visit, to say the last rites. The priest holds a crucifix with Christ on it in front of Julian, and she has a vision. A series of showings from God himself.

Review: On the Road by Jack Kerourack

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Book, Book review, Books, Dean Moriarty, Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Reading, Review, Sal Paradise, United States, World War II

Kerourack sat down to write On the Road, and did so in one sitting.

In fact, that wasn’t enough for him.

Using a typewriter meant he had to stop at the end of each page to put another one in. This stopped the flow of his writing, so he taped together rolls of architect paper into a continuous roll which meant he never had to pause to change a page.

The Scroll of Kerouac’s On the Road

This, on its own, is an interesting fact you can use if the conversation ever runs dry at a dinner party.

Viewed in context of the book however…

Freedom of Press or Responsibility of Press?

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Burchill, Freedom of speech, Glasgow, Hate speech, Julie Burchill, Observer, Press, Responsibility of Press, Text, Toby Young, Transphobia

This is a Texty Tuesdays post, looking at different types of text from the printed word to blogs to things you scribble when you’re bored.

Freedom of speech is something that we, in a developed, civilised society, have every right to. This is a wonderful thing that we should never take for granted or abuse.

We have the right to say what we think, to tell people our opinions, to protest when we don’t agree with something.

Rights and responsibilities come hand-in-hand.

Often, freedom of speech works two-fold. While it gives people the right to say what they want, it also destroys the credibility of those who do so without due consideration.

Review: Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser

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Book, Book review, Fiction, Literature, Review, Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser, United States

This is a Fictional Friday post, where I review a book (but it might not always be fiction)

The early 20th Century had a massive impact on American fiction.

Questions of identity, after America started to gain their own identity as a country, plague early twentieth century writing. Questions of morality, a midst an economical boom and consequent collapse, changing gender rolls and, later, when the prohibition made illegal substances cool and acceptable, created themes for many American authors. After gaining independence, authors begin to write in what is now considered an “American” style, rather than mimicking their forebears as 19th century authors did.

Publishing Sister Carrie at the start of this era, on the turn of the century, Dreiser was very much involved in this movement towards an independent American literature, and also very interesting in ideas of morality.