Twentieth Sunday Salon 10.15
I am trying to finish James Meek's book WE ARE NOW BEGINNING OUR DESCENT but not getting on with it very well. Maybe it is because my head is still thick with cold but I am finding some of it fairly hard to understand; there seem to be a good many pretty-sounding paragraphs but without much meaning, or else sentences tagged on the end of paragraphs which add nothing to what has been said already... or so it seems to me. But then, when I read it out to Hodmandod Senior or my mother, each of them says, 'Oh, but that is beautiful writing!' and just by reading it out I hear that it is beautiful too, but when I read silently, alone, it does not go in.However I shall persist because I am enjoying the story, and I am getting a very good idea of what it must be like to be a correspondent in a war zone. However, the main focus of the book so far seems to be the business of writing novels.
posted by Clare Dudman at 10:18 am
5 Comments:
Sounds like the kind of book you either stick out - or leave for a while and come back to. i had to do that with Faulk's Birdsong as I just wasn't enjoying it. Came back to it a couple of years later and discovered what all the fuss was about!
Yes, Mrs S, strange, isn't it? I think it depends on mood. I have also found that some books, which I find hard going at the start, turn out to be my favourites (I loved Birdsong too, BTW).
Did you read his earlier one (can't remember what it's called now)? I kept seeing it around and meant to get hold of a copy but didn't quite make it. Friends were spilt about it, some like it, some were bored. He doesn't seem to be the easiest of writers to engage with.
Yes, I have it TableTalk - THE PEOPLE'S ACT OF LOVE. It sounds like it might appeal to me more than this one because it has shamans in it, and I've been interested in shamanism for some time now (in an anthropological way). I am getting used to his style a bit now, and relaxing into it, and enjoying it more.
Interesting to hear your response to this. I really struggled with The Peoples Act of Love despite it having lots of components that should have made me love it. I thought it was well written, but I just didnt click with it, that connection that makes you care, makes you want to read on rather than feel you ought to.
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