. Spinning .

Finally. Finished. This. Book.

What should have kept me involved in this book, the prose, the lyrical language, the drilling into the characters and the focus on a single event, somehow lost me. It got tedious to read when I really had no empathy with Hana, the main character perhaps. Or is it Kip? Or Caravaggio? Or the burnt man in the bed of the title of this book.

Hana appears more dopey and self-centered than shell-shocked by war. I see no passion in her relationship with Kip. The English patient just lies there with his little secret love affair with someone’s wife–both parties dead. Caravaggio’s thieving ways provide some sense of adventure and I would have probably enjoyed more background on him. Kip is interesting and yet secretive.

Frankly, the tone of the story is morose and I had the constant feeling of music playing in the background–yes, like a movie. The writing, as I say, is beautifully wrought and yet it is the beauty of words rather than story.  Overall, nnot one of my favorite reads.

This is embarrassing; I haven’t read except for short stories and poetry in almost a month. And I call myself a literary weblog? But the excuse for not reading is one of the best–I’ve been writing a short story a day in hypertext format on Hypercompendia (linked so there’s proof!).

But you can’t eat soup for lunch and type on a laptop at the same time, though God know I’ve tried. So it was finally time to stop carrying the book around with me and actually open it up and start reading.

First, some lovely imagery: “a buckle of noise in the air,” “a wedge of light,” “the lowest rib, its cliff of skin,” “I had broken the spareness of the desert,” and of course, “the penis sleeping like a sea horse.”  This is all within the first couple of pages and these images are separated by direct and concise movement of character and story. So no, it’s not an overdose of flowery prose.

And this caught my attention:

He whispers again, dragging the listening heart of the young nurse beside him to wherever his mind is, into that well of memory he kept plunging into during those months before he died. (p. 4)

Yes, page 4! I recall a story I wrote a few year ago that killed off the main character by the second paragraph (short story versus novel here) and was berated by a critique group who said that killing off the main character at the beginning was a big no-no in writing; that the reader had no more reason now to read the book if the ending is known. I, of course, ignored them.

Many, many novels reveal the end before the tale; it is a writing tool, no more and no less than that. There is just as much reason to know the story of a character–in fiction or non-fiction–whether he’s alive or dead. After all, death is the understood ending even for Cinderella and Prince Charming. In other words, they live “happily ever after” only for x number of years. Then they die, just like everyone else.