Impressions

Oh, where do I even begin? His writing style? Content? Grammar? It's all so radically different from Doctorow's writing and yet, they both fall under the category of postmodernism. Interesting stuff.

In class, lots of people were saying that they enjoyed Reed's spontaneity and complete randomness but I was more than a little bit confused. Unfortunately, when I read, if I don't understand it, I tend to just continue reading and  not realize I'm not taking in anything until like five pages later... which inevitably leads to several rereads. Needless to say, I was more frustrated than amused by the end of the reading. I thought that Reed meant an actual disease when he said "disease of the mind" and because we have recently been watching bio movies regarding bovine spongiform encephalopathy, I immediately thought of prions and mad cow disease. Fortunately, this misunderstanding was cleared up later. Anyway, after listening to the discussions in class, I guess I can see how people enjoyed his taunting of the reader by virtually flaunting the supposed "rules" we set for novel writing. Reed breaks the fourth wall and interjects throughout the story his own little additions to the story, giving us insight on what the meant to do, but also sort of throwing us off (well, throwing me off anyway).

The illustrations are also an interesting addition. Reed throws in random pictures that sometimes seem to offer a purpose (the potential Teutonic Knight symbol on page 14) but can also be utterly indecipherable (like the Satanic word search on page 33). I spent a good amount of time searching for any explanations regarding these pictures but found none, which just sort of adds to the mystique of the whole thing. Also, two small things that aren't terribly important but yet continue to bother me anyway is his use of commas (or lack thereof) and numbers for words. I was really disconcerted to see the lack of commas during lists (this, this, and that) but the worst part is that he isn't consistent about that either! Some lists include all necessary commas and the Oxford comma as well while others don't. So vexing. The other one is the use of numbers for words (1 of them, 1000s of men died, etc). This one is even more insignificant but it irritates me so badly! Hopefully, I grow accustomed to this soon or this is going to be a really tough book to get through.