Strangest good book you ever read?
Oct 11, 2009 22:15:35 GMT
Post by bixaorellana on Oct 11, 2009 22:15:35 GMT
By "good book", I mean something with literary worth that you enjoyed and would recommend to others.
This question occurred to me because I realized for how long and how much the novel Wolf Whistle has resonated for me.
This was one of those books you pick up in the library, read the jacket flaps and think, "Not for me!" I wound up reading Wolf Whistle because a friend who knows me and my reading tastes quite well firmly insisted that I read it.
It's a marvelous and surprising book whose magic can't really be described. Even after you finish it and attempt to discuss it with anyone else who read and loved it, words fall short.
It takes a special, rarefied goodness to write a novel like this, a novel with so much compassion for the flawed human spirit that it inspires sorrow for the malefactor rather than odium.
But what elevates the book into its own singular, strange realm is the humor running throughout. When expressing why I didn't want to read the book, I told my friend that it was impossible for a book about a lynching to be funny. Wrong. In real life, humor runs concurrently with tragedy. Norden manages to get this across in a way that almost re-invents humor. How else to describe a character's logorrheic truth-telling? That lofty subtlety goes hand-in-hand with broadly Southern gothic moments of zany wrongheadedness, which when stirred with the events leading towards a heinous crime, create a novel like no other.
As I said above, the book is indescribable, but for more information, you might read this review.
This question occurred to me because I realized for how long and how much the novel Wolf Whistle has resonated for me.
This was one of those books you pick up in the library, read the jacket flaps and think, "Not for me!" I wound up reading Wolf Whistle because a friend who knows me and my reading tastes quite well firmly insisted that I read it.
It's a marvelous and surprising book whose magic can't really be described. Even after you finish it and attempt to discuss it with anyone else who read and loved it, words fall short.
It takes a special, rarefied goodness to write a novel like this, a novel with so much compassion for the flawed human spirit that it inspires sorrow for the malefactor rather than odium.
But what elevates the book into its own singular, strange realm is the humor running throughout. When expressing why I didn't want to read the book, I told my friend that it was impossible for a book about a lynching to be funny. Wrong. In real life, humor runs concurrently with tragedy. Norden manages to get this across in a way that almost re-invents humor. How else to describe a character's logorrheic truth-telling? That lofty subtlety goes hand-in-hand with broadly Southern gothic moments of zany wrongheadedness, which when stirred with the events leading towards a heinous crime, create a novel like no other.
As I said above, the book is indescribable, but for more information, you might read this review.
