If I were to hazard a guess, I think readers of this book can be split into two camps: those who are receptive to Olsen's fragmentary description and those who aren't. Description, per se, isn't necessarily a device which one can exclusively hang a novel on. But if an author is obsessed with chronicling details, as Olsen clearly is, and if an author dares to use this as an ambitious pretext towards something that is the lifeblood of densely plotted novels, then I say more power to him. Because what fiction is fundamentally about, even when it is highly stylized and seemingly about something else (as Calvino's Invisible Cities is), is human behavior. Uber-description then is perhaps another approach to perspective and an ambitious stab at trying to understand the crazed world around us.
Certainly, one feels like a fly on the wall while reading this novel, at times venturing too close for comfort. On the surface, a sentence such as "The pinkie of a smile widens beneath his vestigial salt-and-pepper moutache" reads like a metaphor gone horribly awry. And yet how many of us have free associated about human beings in such a manner? When we are waiting in line or passing time trying to see if we will be empaneled for a jury, invariably the mind wanders towards the mundane, grasping for drab details in a dusty room. Finding nothing, we look at the person sitting next to us and notice the booger almost comically hanging out of a man's nose. Since there is nothing else but the dry stentorian tone of the next number to stymie the senses, the booger becomes something absurd, perhaps "a congealed flaxen brook" or "the putrid remnants of an emerald mine." Thus, "the pinkie of a smile" becomes something preternaturally valid.
The degree to which one is receptive to this is, I think, what separates those who get Lance Olsen's 10:01 and those who don't. I believe the novel's central question, in dwelling upon these details, is whether or not we should be concerned about them and whether or not these indelible impressions form broader impressions about the world around us. Is one person's perception of a tic enough to sustain a prejudice for a few more years? And what does descriptive perspective say about the person positing it? Further, is it possible that Olsen is suggesting, in a cockeyed way, that the real enemy is us?
You put your finger on something that I actually did like about 10:01--the thought that went to even the tiniest details of the people's lives. There was one in particular early on about a thief breaking into a house and rearranging the fridge poetry. I love that and it stuck with me.
Posted by: gwenda | Oct 07, 2005 at 01:01 PM
I think that this post is very good because has useful information.
Posted by: Inversiones en petroleo | May 24, 2011 at 09:24 AM