I’m having a less than ideal experience with Marquez in this novel in that I am not having those moments of awe and elation that I recall from 100 Years of Solitude. Just when I am writing it off to it merely being a lesser novel, Steve persists in seeing more in a passage than I can conceive, even in my determined effort to find it.
I want to be surprised, I want that element of layers in reading that grants the pleasure of discovery. It may be more necessary for me to explore instead the frame of mind of the reader rather than the writer right now, and how it affects reading and story. Maybe, as much control over story as Barthes hopes to lay in the hands (mind) of the reader, bears a burden not only of desire and experience, but one of mood, or openness and focus as well.
In other words, is it possible for the reader to experience a particular story in many different ways dependent upon time and circumstance? Certainly this would be true in poetry. Is this what broadens the possibility of paths that the more elaborate interactivity of new media methods allows by conscious choice rather than mental state alone?
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology