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A daily record of what I'm thinking about what I'm reading

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Wednesday, March 14, 2018

Some great scenes in Mike McCormack's Solar Bones

Still impressed by  Mike McCormack's tour de force novel Solar Bones (2016), which is composed of a single 200+-page sentence and for all that is notably easy to read and comprehend; this massive sentence comprises the thoughts and remembrances of the narrator, Marcus, in what appears to be a single day or perhaps a single afternoon - though his mind roams freely back and forth in time, including recollections from his childhood right up to present-day events, crises, and issues. I'm not sure yet, and am almost to the conclusion, why these reminiscences occur on this particular day, which seems to be a typical rather than exceptional day in M's life, but perhaps, in the Joyce tradition, any one single day of consciousness can encompass the entire scope of a life, even of a culture (MMcC does not have the pretense of writing about an entire culture, however). The narrator is notably beset by a conflict w/ his culture, which is to say of the contemporary world, between his rage for order - he is a civil engineer and tends to think problems can be solved by good planning - and the uncertainties of his life, including political interference in his work, unmanageable issues involving each of his adult children, and, as we see in some of his remembrances of things past, crises that he has weathered and that have shaped his life. Though I noted yesterday that SB might be a stronger novel if it had even an echo of a conventional plot (character faces crisis and is changed by its resolution); that said, the novel consists of a # of scenes, some quite powerful, most notably: the shock that takes place when M and his wife, Mairead, attend daughter (Agnes)'s art opening; the death of M's father, following his descent into dementia; Mairead's illness, caused by water pollution (a crisis that an engineer would recognize as a technical problem most likely caused by political corruption; and the scenes in which local pols put the squeeze on M to approve projects that fall below official standards for quality and safety.

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