Some of my more loyal visitors will have noticed large dollops of gloom creeping into the pages over the last few days, as well as a rambling, obcurely-presented confession about an "assisted suicide", that, on reflection, I would have preferred to keep to myself for now - particularly as few people have actually read it...
Anyway, part of the reason for my gloom has been the book I've been reading. All my life I've been sucked into writer's worlds, living my life through his/her prism. In my late teens, I remember inhabiting Grahame Greeneland for months at a time - the bleak, logical despair. The amoral morality. It fitted my mood. And that's the point, isn't? We chose writers who fit our moods - but at the same time, we let their interpretions of the mood affect our perceptions. It's the old chicken/egg riddle. An ever changing dialectic - Writer/Reader, Encoding/Decoding, Art Object/Audience.
Too abstract? Well, for example, I tend to fall in love with women who resemble female characters from Dostoevsky novels. Beautiful, passionate and if not truly fucked up the what I might call psychologically epileptic(copyright alecweston 2006). Now, as an adolescent, did I chose Fyodr D because I already craving for his type of woman? (I prefered him, and Chechov to Tolstoy and the turgid Turgenev). Or has my whole life til now been warped by The Devils, Notes from the Underground, Crime and Punishment..? Do I really resemble Raskolnikov? Just asking.
Anyway, the book I finished reading last night is Carry Me Down, by the Irish Australian writer, M.J Hyland.. It's about a 11-year-old boy who comes to believe he can detect lies people tell him - particularly the lies of his parents. The boy is clever, sensistive, borderline mad... and, withot realising it at first, it connected in some way to my own "madness" (Don't mean to be overdramatic. Whoever you are reading this has "madness" as well). And like the boy in Carry Me Down, I felt compelled, in this blog, to indulge in some truths which were self destructive.
This truth thing is bugging me. Before Carry me Down, i read gods in Alabama by Joshilyn Jackson, whose heroine also has a truth obsession. Less powerful or prizewinning that the Hyland book, but still a strong read. It's interesting though, that before I started composing this current post in my head, it hadn't crossed my mind that the two novels I had chosen were more or less about the same thing. And their message? Truth is less important than
