Book: The color of light
May. 15th, 2009 05:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livAuthor: William Goldman
Details: (c) 1984 William Goldman; Pub Warner Books 1985; ISBN 0-446-32587-2
Verdict: The color of light is just as fantastic as my memory of it!
Reasons for reading it: I loved this very very much when I read it four years ago, and I'm running a little low on new books, so decided to plunge back into it.
How it came into my hands:rysmiel convinced me to buy it from one of the amazing second hand bookshops when I was in Montreal.
I still love The color of light, and I still find it difficult to articulate what's so wonderful about it. It's yet another of those books of writing about writing, and that itself has been enough to make it a very hard sell when I've tried to push it on people. It's also rather downbeat; basically it's about the protagonist overcoming adversity only to be plunged into more dreadful adversity. But the language is absolutely stunning, and the evocation of such a huge range of human emotions. It's hard to explain why anyone would want to read something that gives such a strong emotional impression of abusive parenting and failure and bereavement and betrayal (and yet everything on a very focused, personal scale, no grand world-shaking drama here). I think the pleasure I take in tCoL is mainly admiration for the incredible mastery of prose and character building. Chub also manages to be a very likeable and sympathetic failure, it's easy to relate to him even when he's destroying his own golden opportunities. And that saves it from being depressing as a whole, especially as the highs and victories are equally well conveyed as the tragedy.
I'm still not sure about part III. The ending of part II is just the most powerful scene I've ever come across in all of literature, and perhaps even more devastating when I knew it was coming. It made the whole thing feel like a tragedy with the inevitability of doom heightening all the earlier, apparently happy scenes. I think a book that ended there would be pretty heartbreaking, though. And part III has too many implausible coincidences and strange characters, as if it's breaking away from the realism of the earlier sections. I wonder if it's doing something literary and clever where the whole section takes place in Chub's fevered imagination when his sanity is broken by the tragedy at the end of part II. Perhaps Sandy and The Bone are just aspects of his muse or something like that; Sandy especially seems a lot less believable as a person than almost everybody else with the book.
I enjoyed the friendship between Chub and Kitchel even more on a second reading. Kitchel is in general a fascinating character, even if we only see his life through Chub's viewpoint. The other thing that worked really well for me was that the book almost succeeded in convincing me with the metafictive thing, that this book that I was holding in my hands was in fact the Great Novel that Chub keeps trying and failing to write. I suppose if you look at it that way, the ending has at least a glimmer of positivity! But even with the weird stuff I had to keep pinching myself to remind myself that this is a work of fiction, not a true autobiography.
Details: (c) 1984 William Goldman; Pub Warner Books 1985; ISBN 0-446-32587-2
Verdict: The color of light is just as fantastic as my memory of it!
Reasons for reading it: I loved this very very much when I read it four years ago, and I'm running a little low on new books, so decided to plunge back into it.
How it came into my hands:
rysmiel convinced me to buy it from one of the amazing second hand bookshops when I was in Montreal.I still love The color of light, and I still find it difficult to articulate what's so wonderful about it. It's yet another of those books of writing about writing, and that itself has been enough to make it a very hard sell when I've tried to push it on people. It's also rather downbeat; basically it's about the protagonist overcoming adversity only to be plunged into more dreadful adversity. But the language is absolutely stunning, and the evocation of such a huge range of human emotions. It's hard to explain why anyone would want to read something that gives such a strong emotional impression of abusive parenting and failure and bereavement and betrayal (and yet everything on a very focused, personal scale, no grand world-shaking drama here). I think the pleasure I take in tCoL is mainly admiration for the incredible mastery of prose and character building. Chub also manages to be a very likeable and sympathetic failure, it's easy to relate to him even when he's destroying his own golden opportunities. And that saves it from being depressing as a whole, especially as the highs and victories are equally well conveyed as the tragedy.
I'm still not sure about part III. The ending of part II is just the most powerful scene I've ever come across in all of literature, and perhaps even more devastating when I knew it was coming. It made the whole thing feel like a tragedy with the inevitability of doom heightening all the earlier, apparently happy scenes. I think a book that ended there would be pretty heartbreaking, though. And part III has too many implausible coincidences and strange characters, as if it's breaking away from the realism of the earlier sections. I wonder if it's doing something literary and clever where the whole section takes place in Chub's fevered imagination when his sanity is broken by the tragedy at the end of part II. Perhaps Sandy and The Bone are just aspects of his muse or something like that; Sandy especially seems a lot less believable as a person than almost everybody else with the book.
I enjoyed the friendship between Chub and Kitchel even more on a second reading. Kitchel is in general a fascinating character, even if we only see his life through Chub's viewpoint. The other thing that worked really well for me was that the book almost succeeded in convincing me with the metafictive thing, that this book that I was holding in my hands was in fact the Great Novel that Chub keeps trying and failing to write. I suppose if you look at it that way, the ending has at least a glimmer of positivity! But even with the weird stuff I had to keep pinching myself to remind myself that this is a work of fiction, not a true autobiography.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-05-17 04:01 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-05-19 08:00 pm (UTC)