Book frustration

[avevale_intelligencer]

A many years ago, prompted by friends raving about it, I tried to read Moonwise by Greer Gilman. It didn't make any sense to me. I mentioned this to various people, and got looked at funny.

Today I have tried again. I'm on page six, and I have no idea what I'm supposed to be understanding from this. The language is ridiculously over-florid ("her heart dunted with amaze" about someone who doesn't know what fork to use?) and contains archaisms such as "unlethe" which are completely opaque to me. If I try hard I can tease out what is actually happening (a person is looking round a house and remembering stuff) but I'm obviously missing far too much of the associated atmosphere and overtones and undertones and so on for it to be worth going on. I got much further into it last time, but then I thought I had something to prove.

My writing is practically Asimovian in its pedestrian transparency. I sometimes think it would be nice if I could master some more individual style. But this is way over on the other extreme, so individual that it could hardly help but be (in my opinion) barely comprehensible to anyone but the author. To all those who have read and enjoyed it, I applaud your stamina and your linguistic flexibility. It's beyond me.

Back on the shelf it goes, till the next time.

EDIT: and I'd completely forgotten the faithfully phonetically rendered rustic accent and speech mode of half the characters, which made even the dialogue in large measure incomprehensible. Since by the time I'd got that far I was clinging to the dialogue as to a spar in a shipwreck, well, you can guess what happened.

Comments

[phoebesmum.livejournal.com]

Being out of the loop on what the Thinking SF Fan ort to rede, I went and had a look on Amazon, where someone with a pretentious username informed me that "We go to it for an experience of language that makes us feel as if the roots of psychic and telluric realities have been laid bare" - which sounds (a) rather dangerous to me and (b) altogether too much like hard work. Then someone started wiffling on about Finnegans Wake. Noooo! Once was enough!

But I do fail at being intelecksheral on oh-so-many levels, so don't take my word for it.

[keristor.livejournal.com]

I keep saying that I ought to try reading Joyce. It's not that I've tried and failed, it's just that I've never got round tuit. When I retire...

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

You've read FW once? You have a strange definition of the word "fail", my dear, at least when it's applied to you. I've noticed this before...