Hello everybody- the book this week was Luiselli’s “Faces in a crowd”, which I don’t even really know how to describe the plot…think ghosts but not really, a wife with a husband and 2 children but not really, and a girl working in a publishing firm as a translator that’s a bit obsessed with this dead author.
Im not exactly sure how this came to be but for every week I can sort of mentally imagine the story, and it was always tinged in yellow a, bid faded and fuzzy like how old TV was. But this weeks reading was finally in colour, and also above 840p resolution wise. Maybe it has to do with the electronic copy of the book being a super crisp white, but I think it mostly has to do with the tone of the writing now, as we are at the last book of the semester, meaning it’s a lot more recent. But even then, with the choppiness of the book and jumps between first person narration, none of the mental images I have count as “coherent” either.
The husband and wife of this book is quite interesting to me because I find that building a house (architect-ing it, like designing it) feels quite similar to writing a book in some ways- to design the foundation of the story, its progression, overarching themes and writing styles; each of it is an element to build a coherent story just like you would build a house with its foundations, walls, stairs etc. But at one point, the narrator compared her work to her husbands (an architect) and says “I can’t make spaces from nothing. I can’t invent. I only manage to emulate my ghosts, write the way they used to speak, not make noise, narrate out phantasmagoria” (to save you the Google, it means a constant shifting complex succession of things seen or imagined- which also applies to faces you would see in a crowd wink wink). I would think that any sort of writing is invention in a way, but given the shifting perspectives and stories with this book I sort of get where the author is coming from as stories seem as if they are from ghosts both real and not real at once.
This book is one of the few books from this class that I would’ve picked up for myself to read (the other is probably The Lover) and I actually quite enjoyed it- both the book itself and the experience reading it. Also as a complete side note, from the GLIMPSES into the wife’s familial life, I finally realized that I really just want to read a normal book in this class for once ???????????? I forgot how much I missed reading a book where the ordinary things happen (although this book is only 1/3 that; normal and not normal at the same time).
my question for all this week is: if you were to write your own book somewhat based on yourself and somewhat fictionalize it, what would you choose to write about?