Buy:johnnysd
07-05-08, 02:39 AM
I hope I can survive this thread without getting flamed and riducled to death.
I have excellent reading comprehension skills. Back in high school I scored over 700 on the English SAT, and took many literature courses in college all of which I excelled in.
I have read a good amount of classic and modern "literature", but I do not specifically search out literature to read. Truth be told, I really enjoy fantasy and much of my reading is devoted to that genre.
Having said all that I have just finished my first Cormac McCarthy book, The Road. I enjoyed it, as much as someone can "enjoy" such a singularly bleak and disturbing book.
The book seems to alternate between very concise, cogent and well written descriptions of the actions of the book, with short highly dense sections of almost impenetrable writing.
I must admit that there are certain sections in this book, where I have absolutely no strong idea whatsoever what the author is saying and that has never really happened to me before.
Example: (Spoilers for those who have not read it as this first is the last section of the story)
Quote: Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.
As this is the last paragraph in the book it obviously encapsulates an important theme or message of the book. But for the life of me I really have little idea what he is saying. I have some ideas based upon everthing else that the story was about, but nothing that directly comes from the excerpt itself.
Then this one:
]He got up and wlked out to the road. The black shape of it running from dark to dark. Then a distant low rumble. Not thunder. You could feel it under your feet. A sound without cognate and so wothout description. Something imponderable shifting out there in the dark. The earth itself contracting with the cold. It did not come again. What time of year? What age the child? He walked out into the road and stood. The silence. The salliter drying from the earth. The mudstained shapes of flooded cities burned to the waterline. At a crossroads a ground set with dolmen stones where the spoken bones of oracles lay smoldering. No sound but the wind. What will you say? A liiving man spoke these lines? He sharpened a quill with his small pen knife to scribe these things in sloe or lampblack. At some reckonable and entabled moment? He is coming to steal my eyes. To seal my mouth with dirt.[/B]
Again, no real clue. I could analyze and guess and make intelligent conversation on the shifting point of views in the paragraph, and how he is talking about sounds that you only feel but not hear or something, but to be honest I have no idea what he is saying. It is impenetrable. Maybe some would not admit though, or think the vagueness and nebulousness of the passage is some stroke of literary genius. I am not saying it is or isn't.
I only know that I have read a book that has passages in it that even when reread many times, I have no idea what it means.
Do other people experience this? What do these passages mean to you? Do you have passages you read recently that have you equally confounded. I would be curious to hear people's thoughts.
I have excellent reading comprehension skills. Back in high school I scored over 700 on the English SAT, and took many literature courses in college all of which I excelled in.
I have read a good amount of classic and modern "literature", but I do not specifically search out literature to read. Truth be told, I really enjoy fantasy and much of my reading is devoted to that genre.
Having said all that I have just finished my first Cormac McCarthy book, The Road. I enjoyed it, as much as someone can "enjoy" such a singularly bleak and disturbing book.
The book seems to alternate between very concise, cogent and well written descriptions of the actions of the book, with short highly dense sections of almost impenetrable writing.
I must admit that there are certain sections in this book, where I have absolutely no strong idea whatsoever what the author is saying and that has never really happened to me before.
Example: (Spoilers for those who have not read it as this first is the last section of the story)
Quote: Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.
As this is the last paragraph in the book it obviously encapsulates an important theme or message of the book. But for the life of me I really have little idea what he is saying. I have some ideas based upon everthing else that the story was about, but nothing that directly comes from the excerpt itself.
Then this one:
]He got up and wlked out to the road. The black shape of it running from dark to dark. Then a distant low rumble. Not thunder. You could feel it under your feet. A sound without cognate and so wothout description. Something imponderable shifting out there in the dark. The earth itself contracting with the cold. It did not come again. What time of year? What age the child? He walked out into the road and stood. The silence. The salliter drying from the earth. The mudstained shapes of flooded cities burned to the waterline. At a crossroads a ground set with dolmen stones where the spoken bones of oracles lay smoldering. No sound but the wind. What will you say? A liiving man spoke these lines? He sharpened a quill with his small pen knife to scribe these things in sloe or lampblack. At some reckonable and entabled moment? He is coming to steal my eyes. To seal my mouth with dirt.[/B]
Again, no real clue. I could analyze and guess and make intelligent conversation on the shifting point of views in the paragraph, and how he is talking about sounds that you only feel but not hear or something, but to be honest I have no idea what he is saying. It is impenetrable. Maybe some would not admit though, or think the vagueness and nebulousness of the passage is some stroke of literary genius. I am not saying it is or isn't.
I only know that I have read a book that has passages in it that even when reread many times, I have no idea what it means.
Do other people experience this? What do these passages mean to you? Do you have passages you read recently that have you equally confounded. I would be curious to hear people's thoughts.