Wednesday, November 13, 2019
Continuing moods
So this is definitely different than any other book I've read before. I have read some poetry but not a continous type story so it is challenging but also interesting and something im glad im getting exposed to although i have trouble understanding it all. For instance, I noticed that up until 14 he used "I' but then in the second paragraph of 14 it say, "There's no longer any limit to the things that I (from here on in I'll say "we" out of embarrassment) are able to say." then he goes on to list many things that "we" do and for as far as I have read now, which is up to 50, is that the narrator uses "we" instead of "I" and I don't really understand why. I can see how some of the sections relate to one another directly, but it also veers in different directions spontaneously. For example, I cannot yet see the correlation between 43 and 44, if any. 43 starts off "we remember how beautiful uncle Zoltan was. and how beautiful our stepmother Francesca was. They too were precisely what they were, but then, when we were children, we only wanted solid forms. (solid forms??? like solid role models I wasn't sure about that) This is relevant to previous sections, like 36 that mentions uncle Zoltan and they have also mentioned the stepmother Francesca before. But 44 doesn't seem to have any connection "a certain sheikh from a sufi sect saw that the time to pray had come...but since a cat was sleeping on the sleeve of his cloak, he cut off his sleeve and went to pray with one arm covered and the other exposed." I can't see the relation of this section to the previous ones yet, but maybe it will come about in upcoming sections. I read 49, but I'm not exactly sure how Hoffmann is talking about the importance of the Holocaust in the book yet.
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Hi Catherine:
ReplyDeleteGood question about the use of "we." Check out this on "the royal 'we'": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_we