The weekend was quiet, undemanding, and friendly, with plenty of sleep, good opener to a packed week. I head north this afternoon, teach tomorrow, and then on Wednesday I'll be back in the editing saddle, a backup singer belting other people's tunes. [Ah, mixed metaphors: how you amuse me.]
I finished Nicholas Nickleby yesterday--800 pages devoured in less than a week. I will say I felt a little sad that no one responded to my excitement about his precision of exaggeration. It felt important to me, a discovery, a specific recognition of a specific tool for intensifying a writer's and reader's engagement. But of course my thrills aren't yours, and few people adore Dickens today, let alone view him as a craft model. I shouldn't take it to heart.
2 comments:
Sorry to say, Nicholas Nickleby is one I have not yet read. I want to now! Now, if we want to have a deep conversation about how Hard Times is a novel that could be written today, and has deep relevance to the imminent social stratification...
Actually what I want to have is a craft discussion about Dickens. I think a focus on his social side has overshadowed the genius of his language control: his ear, his rhetoric; the way in which he accumulates imagery, etc. In many ways Hard Times is an anomaly. It is more unrelentingly didactic than most of his other novels; and because it is by far the shortest, it has much less room for weaving and dancing. It's my least favorite of his books because it's the least subtle, language-wise.
Post a Comment