A review by obscuredbyclouds
How Fiction Works by James Wood
3.0
This book lay next to my bed for over a year, half-way read through. It confused me greatly, and a lot of things went over my head. I got the feeling James Wood really had no problem losing me right away. When he talks about novels and tells you what he think is happening there, structurally or stylistically, he expects you to have read them and know the characters names by heart. Which meant whenever he talked about authors I've read - Sartre, Mann, Austen, Roth, Foster Wallace, etc - I could follow and found some of the things he said enlightening. And whenever he talked of authors I hadn't read - Flaubert & most of the Russians - I felt instantly lost.
This is highly pretentious both in its wording and the structure (over 100 short, numbered paragraphs), as well as in how sure James Wood is of himself and is assertions. Still, there were interesting notes and the book did get me wondering about the pros and cons of realism and realistic style. Also, it made me want to read some of the books he talked about that I haven't read yet. His enthusiasm for them was really tangible.
This is not so much a book for writers (or not meant to be), as it is a book for seasoned readers.
We have to read musically, testing the precision and rhythm of a sentence, listening for the almost inaudible rustle of historical association clinging to the hems of modern words, attending to patterns, repetitions, echoes, deciding why one metaphor is successful and another is not, judging how the perfect placement of the right verb or adjective seals a sentence with mathematical finality.
This is highly pretentious both in its wording and the structure (over 100 short, numbered paragraphs), as well as in how sure James Wood is of himself and is assertions. Still, there were interesting notes and the book did get me wondering about the pros and cons of realism and realistic style. Also, it made me want to read some of the books he talked about that I haven't read yet. His enthusiasm for them was really tangible.
This is not so much a book for writers (or not meant to be), as it is a book for seasoned readers.
We have to read musically, testing the precision and rhythm of a sentence, listening for the almost inaudible rustle of historical association clinging to the hems of modern words, attending to patterns, repetitions, echoes, deciding why one metaphor is successful and another is not, judging how the perfect placement of the right verb or adjective seals a sentence with mathematical finality.