Coolland itibaren Berfay, France
Just finished this in order to consider teaching it to my 11th graders in the place of The Great Gatsby. Definitely a quicker read and easier to comprehend but I don't see my east coasters engaging much with the text. The Grapes of Wrath would be better but they'd flip out at the density of that novel. The search continues.
Robert Coover is impressive. Let’s start there. It’s not just his writing (which is good; not the best, but definitely good) and it’s not just his structural daring (which, judging by much of contemporary literature, is still ahead of its time, despite the fact that he’s been structurally daring for over thirty years now). No, what’s most impressive about Coover is his imagination. It’s the way he imagines a scene. The writing of it, that’s just how he brings the scene into his reader’s head. Good writers do that. They all do it differently, of course, but they all do it. What is impressive about Coover is that he imagines the scene at all. There are a lot of fucked up people out there. These people aren’t fucked up in the sense of having sex with dead bodies, but fucked up in the sense that, when asked to imagine the prospect of having sex with dead bodies, they are willing to be sympathetic towards the idea. “You understand of course…that I am not, in the strictest sense, a traditionalist. … On the other hand, I do not join hands with those who find inherent in tradition some malignant evil. … I am personally convinced…there is a middle road. … It spite of that, however, some things still make me puke! … Now get rid of that fucking corpse!” (“Seven Exemplary Fictions” 91). It takes a special kind of imagination, however, to create the idea in the first place. In Pricksongs & Descants, Coover has proven his ability to imagine such scenes almost at will. In “The Poker,” Coover introduces his reader to an abandoned island estate that may or may not be magically haunted. In “Morris in Chains,” Coover addresses the conflict between techno-influenced humanity and nature-influenced humanity through the former’s press release regarding the capture of a Pan-like shepherd named Morris. In “The Gingerbread House,” the tale of Hansel and Gretel becomes 42 dreadful and beautiful and numbered paragraphs. To continue the list is to continue the table of contents of Pricksongs & Descants, but within each item in that list, it would be possible to find some scene, some metaphor, some sentence, that only fucked up people could possibly enjoy. What hope there is in that!