Modern culture contains curious proportionalities and unexpected corrolations. The incidence of reading Dave Eggers novels is directly proportional to the wordiness and/or purgative, soliloquative nature of one’s blogging. Also related, listening to Morrissey’s Bona Drag is directly proportional to the once-impossible desire to actually return to the likes of Sheerness-on-sea. Who could have imagined such a thing?
Eggers’ self-confessional, inner-monologue style really threw me when reading A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius – it’s autobiographical, right? Or is it? I think some sort of bizarre mixture of fact and fiction, carefully treading a line between wistful, genuine beauty and family-alienating, ugly truth. You Shall Know Our Velocity is entirely fictional, but the protagonist’s internal wranglings have a real ring of authenticity about them, in the same way as, say, Nick Hornby’s oft-lovelorn, mostly scarily recognisable prose.
It lends itself well to blogging, this gushing, pouring, near stream-of-consciousness approach.
Filed under: books | Tagged: dave eggers
