Re: Salinger and Nabokov / Flaubert's Parrot -Reply -Reply
Camille Scaysbrook (verona_beach@geocities.com)
Sat, 05 Sep 1998 10:32:19 +1000
> Secondly, if his work IS a jigsaw puzzle, then ultimately that is true
> for all writers. Kurt Vonnegut's body of work is a monument for me.
> Each piece, each story, each novel makes me appreciate the others all
> the more.
Well, yes and no. I sort of meant it in a different way. Like, say you had
three little stories, one called `Red Riding Hood Goes for a Walk', the
second `Red Riding Hood Meets a Wolf' and the third `Red Riding Hood and
the Woodsman'. Imagine they work in their own right, but form a more
transcendent meaning once put together to make an ultimate narrative.
That's how I look on the Glass stories. What you're proposing is a similar
thing, but it's more like a volume of Mother Goose's Fairy Tales - a group
of stories linked by certain themes and combining to form a certain sort of
mythology, yet all coming from different places and universes. In the Glass
stories, we move within a Glass Universe - in `Down at the Dingy', `A
Perfect Day...' `Franny' and so forth we get a window into this exclusive
universe. It's a lot like what I said about Tarantino - how certain
characters pop up in all his movies. Or take another tack - I don't know if
you're familiar with Jane Austen, but it's as if Emma, Elizabeth Bennet and
Catherine Morland all lived next to one another. It has nothing whatsoever
to do with whether Seymour (or Salinger) is a genius; just the way he
approaches his work.
Camille
verona_beach@geocities.com
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