There was a reason I selected A Death in the Family as my next-up read: it tastes completely different than the novels I’ve read in the past several weeks. Ths novel was published in 1956 and at its time, contemporary. Reading it fifty years later yet knowing something of the era through experience as a kid changes it somewhat from a reading either at the time, or in the year 2050.
There is a softness in post-war America, an idyllic world where people married, bought a house, raised children and maybe hid a heartbreaking secret. Or authors wrote of the seemier side, the factories and streets lit up alone from neon bar signs. But if you read one of the former now, in this year of 2007, there are all kinds of possibilities that might have affected these lives and stories. Coming down from tools such as hypertext, or from technology of computers and the internet, or the premise of string theory or a two-dimensional world; all these can intrude upon a century to open it up. After all, some of what is real and commonplace to us would be fantasy to our ancestors just a generation or two ago.
So where’s the melding of the worlds, the destruction or simple ignorance of time? What if time, in a cosmic game of musical chairs played with cubes of space, sat anywhere it landed?
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology
We don’t live in Upton Sinclair-land anymore. Think “China,” “India,” burgeoning growth, where the shackles of tyranny are bound to be broken.
True, but what I’m saying is that what the reader is bringing to the reading is a different worldview and incorporated into the story, it could be quite a bit of fun!
Most readers don’t put that much thought behind it.