Tuesday, January 22, 2008

End of the land sadness

What do you think the San Francisco chapters contributed to the narrative?
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3 comments:

Erin said...

I'm tempted to say the San Francisco chapters felt a little out of place to me. But then I'm not sure why I think that.

The peep show place was kind of comical, kind of sad. The characters there were interesting. I think Cal needed that San Fran buffer in his story, between his childhood as Calliope and his adulthood as Cal. And meeting someone else with a similar condition was obviously significant for him.

3:54 PM, January 23, 2008
kc said...

They felt a little out of place to me, too, maybe because Cal was literally out of place — ripped out of the context of his life and thrust into that buffer, as you put it, between childhood and the life to come.

It was important that he met some people like himself,as you say, and the one woman was a writer and was engaged in thinking about her life from a writerly perspective, which I think was also significant for Cal — that idea of seeing your subjective experience from a more detached, objective point of view.

And California and that brief sojourn on the road showed him some options for his life. He could become an outcast, a sexual oddity, something wholly disconnected from his past, or he could reclaim his past and become the cosmopolitan he was clearly meant to be. In the foreign service, he was still a wanderer of sorts, but he wasn't cut off from his roots.

7:38 PM, January 23, 2008
rev amy said...

I too felt the San Fran chapters were out of place, the weakest part of the story. Like Eugenides didn't quite know how to get from the amazing world he created for Calliope to the narrator Cal. Obviously he had to be displaced from family to get there, go on his own Odyssey.

Perhaps they felt weak because they were too short. The story telling didn't reflect the depth of change we had to know was happening for Cal in those months away.

8:20 PM, January 28, 2008

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