![[what I read in 2002]](/images/review_banner.gif)
Northern Tales ::
When I was younger, I had a tendency to adopt the writing style of whatever book I am reading at the time. Whether it be Kurt Vonnegut or Gabriel Garcia Marquez, it always seemed like Iëm trying to get inside another writerës head, to ask the question, “what would [such-and-such an author] do with this character?” I remember when I was in college, my fiction tended to have the same verbosity of a David Foster Wallace novel (although where his writing was elegant and direct, mine was labored and meandering). I havenët really felt myself doing this until recently, when I read this collection of stories. During that time I saw my writing style change quite a bit, much like it used to in college. Only this time I think it worked out better than it did when I was nineteen and reading hipster post-ironic tomes. Hereës an example of my writing, from a post I made to this site while I was at the height of this book:
I will drop off the tent, they will go to the store to buy groceries. I do not know what time I will be back, but I may be gone for a while. Is that OK with them? Yes, it is fine, they will see me when I get back. We are on the bus together, because we are headed in the same direction. The driver yells at us about standing behind the line, about how transfers cost an extra thirty cents.
Now, hereës a passage from the tale “The Whale, the Sea Scorpion, the Stone, and the Eagle,” which is about a girl who escapes from her husband, a whale:
A little while after, the whale tugged at the line again, and only now did it discover that it was not the girl but a bone at the end of the line. Then it rushed out of the house, gathered up all its bones, so that it became a whale again, and set off in pursuit of the fugitives, who were already far away. But in its haste, it forgot its hipbones.
Do you see the similarities here? Do you? Thereës a simplicity in the sentence structure, thereës a quirkiness to the world set forth by the matter-of-fact language. I know itës hard to see because whereas mine takes place in Chicago, the tale I chose takes place in a mystical land in which women actually marry whales. So I guess really, what I am trying to say here, is that you must trust me when I say that this book has influenced my writing style.
The single most compelling aspect of these tales is this: we see a world in which there is no barrier between the story tellerës physical world and their internal, subjective one. I know Iëm starting to sound all philosophical and mushy, but listen. Inasmuch as these stories do reveal something about the culture out of which they were born, and more specifically about the person who tells them, I saw a world in which there was no difference between the life of the story and the life of the story teller. This world is alive with spirits and spell-casting shaman and a man who lives on the moon and has a magical, hovering dog sled. This world is one in which stories flourish, in which they are everywhere. The stories of this world create a captivating vision of human existence, and the writing that conjures it up is worth trying to emulate.
« top »