graywacke's review
3.0
I read her book Sorry years ago and it was an odd experience where I didn't love the book, but was really struck by the writing. I waited years to read this book because I just never was in the right place to take in the kind of writing I was expecting.
Dreams of Speaking was published one year before Sorry, and the writing is quite different and not as good, but the book is actually quite interesting. Jones is looking hard at modern life and the isolation caused by technology. Alice, the Australian main character, is in Paris trying to write a book on this when she meets Mr. Sakamota, a Japanese survivor of the Nagasaki atomic bomb. Mr. Sakamota is writing a book on Alexander Grahm Bell and about the humanity in technology and how Bell's insights into human speech led him toward his invention. Through the book Alice will encounter a series of challenging experiences on subways, in her family, her relationships, and she will even visit the atomic bomb museum in Nagasaki. It's not clear where it leaves her, but somewhere bouncing between the her own pessimism and Mr. Sakamota's optimism about technology. I find it thought provoking.
The writing I didn't like. Everything is described in multiple phrases with slightly different meaning and feel as she tries to capture different perspectives all in one sentence. The affect is a mixed sense of repetition, indecisiveness and hyperbole. That may have been an intended affect (it's a feature lacking whenever Mr. Sakamota talks or writes), but it's unpleasant...and clearly not what I was anticipating.
On the whole I'm mixed.
'The difficulty with celebrating modernity,' he declared, 'is that we live with so many persistently unmodern things. Dreams, love, babies, illness. Memory. Death. And all the natural things. Leaves, birds, ocean, animals. Think of your Australian kangaroo,' he added. 'The kangaroo is truly unmodern.'
Here he paused and smiled, as if telling himself a joke.
'And sky. Think of sky. There is nothing modern about the sky.'
Dreams of Speaking was published one year before Sorry, and the writing is quite different and not as good, but the book is actually quite interesting. Jones is looking hard at modern life and the isolation caused by technology. Alice, the Australian main character, is in Paris trying to write a book on this when she meets Mr. Sakamota, a Japanese survivor of the Nagasaki atomic bomb. Mr. Sakamota is writing a book on Alexander Grahm Bell and about the humanity in technology and how Bell's insights into human speech led him toward his invention. Through the book Alice will encounter a series of challenging experiences on subways, in her family, her relationships, and she will even visit the atomic bomb museum in Nagasaki. It's not clear where it leaves her, but somewhere bouncing between the her own pessimism and Mr. Sakamota's optimism about technology. I find it thought provoking.
The writing I didn't like. Everything is described in multiple phrases with slightly different meaning and feel as she tries to capture different perspectives all in one sentence. The affect is a mixed sense of repetition, indecisiveness and hyperbole. That may have been an intended affect (it's a feature lacking whenever Mr. Sakamota talks or writes), but it's unpleasant...and clearly not what I was anticipating.
On the whole I'm mixed.
'The difficulty with celebrating modernity,' he declared, 'is that we live with so many persistently unmodern things. Dreams, love, babies, illness. Memory. Death. And all the natural things. Leaves, birds, ocean, animals. Think of your Australian kangaroo,' he added. 'The kangaroo is truly unmodern.'
Here he paused and smiled, as if telling himself a joke.
'And sky. Think of sky. There is nothing modern about the sky.'
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