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So what am I thinking about What Can I Do When Everything's on Fire?, which I have now read roughly a third of? Well first that too much of my reading experience with it has been asking myself what I'm thinking about it rather than doing the thinking about it... And maybe this is what I mean by calling it a difficult book, one that does not engage me, one that I have to struggle to engage myself in. I want to identify with Paulo, to get inside his head; and it seems like this should be easy -- Lobo Antunes' stream-of-consciousness seems to be intended as a straight-up portrait of the inside of Paulo's head. So what's the difficulty? Primarily I think it is the absense of any narrative framework. What makes the stream-of-consciousness in e.g. Faulkner's The Hamlet so striking, is that you have a handle on what's going on outside Isaac's consciousness. I am also a bit troubled by the decision to have Paulo "narrating" this book from inside a mental ward -- I have certainly experienced my own reality the way Paulo is doing, as repetitive images from memory; and I am not sick. (Well maybe a little sick I guess -- but nothing that requires hospitalization...) If Paulo were more lucid I think there would be a lot more room for understanding the ways he has been damaged -- this could also get past the (unmet) need I'm seeing for an external narrator. So: the book is not seeming to me like a successful one so far. But as I said, I'm in the middle of it -- I'm going to go on reading for the beaty of the language and images, and perhaps the fragmentary scenes Lobo Antunes is painting will come together into a story.
posted morning of January 4th, 2009: Respond
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