Books 2010: the ghosts were there in all seasons

[hawkwing_lb]

Books 2010: 129


129. Guy Gavriel Kay, Under Heaven.


Beautiful. Bittersweet. Lyric. Difficult to describe.

Go forth and read it.

Comments

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Yeah that. That thing he does? I wanna do that.

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

Chaz, mate?

You sort of already do. :)

But yeah. That thing. Although I was less than satisfied with the epilogue.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

The epilogue - yeah, this has sort of become one of the things he does, where he tells you how things fell out for various characters within the narrative. I dunno. I wouldn't do it that way, myself; but I think it works for him. At least, I trot with it, because that is a part of What He Does.

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I mean, it was not a bad epilogue? But where it ended, it was a clean book. The epilogue just reminded me that history is full of endings that don't end and continuing people being kinda stupid akshully.

I do not read fiction to be reminded that there are no clean endings. Fiction is for the illusion of endings that could be clean, the moment of grace that does not cease, because the narrative leaves it lie, there on the final page.

(I am perhaps opinionated and ranty and somewhat more tired than I ought to be right now.)

[desperance.livejournal.com]

...Or perhaps you are just not cottoning to the Thing He Does, which is absolutely to remind you that fiction is not to be divorced from real life, that within the real-life of the novels there are also no clean endings, and people go on and are stupid and and and.

(This is not the first time he has done this.)

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

I can understand it without liking it.

But I read enough real history that I really crave that moment of grace - of equilibrium, before the fall, the continuance, the every-damn-day-of-the-rest-of-your-lives - in a book. A suspension, a quiet moment... but I can understand it as an artistic choice.

It doesn't work so well for me, but then. I probably spend far too much of my time as it is reading about the complicated indeterminate messy continuances of other people's stories. (And Plato. Oh, Plato. This is not a well-ordered universe. How many millennia of philosophers have you doomed by now?) :)

[desperance.livejournal.com]

And Plato. Oh, Plato.

Heh. Only this morning, on the radio, I heard a woman refer to Plato's Fido. "No," I thought, "wait, what...?" And then she mentioned Socrates, and then my brain fell in step with her accent, and all was straight again. But I do now have this image of the philosopher and his dog. Big boundy floppy thing, dashing all over the place, the very opposite of order...

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

You get people talking about Plato on the radio? Lucky man. But that is a very strange and amusing image.

(I always saw philosophers as cat people, myself. :P )