Friday, February 11, 2011
"The Imperfectionists"
Did you like the book overall? How about the way it was written, with each chapter focusing on a different character (and a different bit of the newspaper's history)? Do you think that was a strong way to tell the story or mainly just a convenient way to manage/organize a kind of sprawling narrative?
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4 comments:
I loved it. The writing and characters were delightful, and the newsroom stories really rang true. I liked the format, the way we got to see so many characters' points of view and the way they all lined up together in the history of the paper. I can see how the format could seem like just a lazy way to tell the story, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.
I really liked the book. I thought of it as a short story collection, with the same characters and setting throughout. I thought of the italicized interludes as one story, unlike the way I viewed the chapters.
Whatever you call it, it was very good.
Does it bother any of you to see a narrative written in present tense? I always think that sounds a little forced and unnatural. While I liked the book overall, I kept being distracted by the present tense writing.
I wonder whether that is part of the reason I thought of it as aggressive writing sometimes (as I mentioned on another thread).
I figure we have a reasonably insider view on the workings of a newsroom to appreciate why there were so many narrators. The paranoid copy editor, the slacking obit writer, the ambitious m.e. I enjoyed watching the tale unfold through their relatable perspectives.
It was darker than I expected, but that also made it suspenseful for me.
And there were a lot of little things to delight in -- Herman's bizarre collection of reference guides, Winston's painful attempts at his first story: "The yellow Egyptian sun shone very brightly, as if that golden sphere were blazing with the very hope for peace in the Middle East that burned also within the heart of the Palestinian undersecretary for sports, fishing and wildlife." Oh, and rereading the headlines over the years through the reader's narrative.
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