decemberthirty | Entries tagged with ken kesey

I finished -Sometimes a Great Notion- a few days ago, and the only thing I have to say is "read it." Everyone read it. It's amazing, and that's all there is to it.

I'm currently reading -Rabbit Redux-. Updike's sequel to -Rabbit, Run-. I haven't really read enough to form much of an opinion yet, so I won't say too much here. It's well-written, as is all Updike, but so far the characters and their petty little lives feel sort of dirty to me. No one is as sympathetic as they were the first time around.

Hmmm. Yesterday was an interesting lapse. I decided back in July sometime that putting my personal life here on the internet was not interesting to me, but then for some reason yesterday I crossed that line again. Hmmm. At the time it felt like a continuation of the playing-with-fire mood that caused the situation that I was writing about. Hmmm.

Anyhow, I am almost finished with -Sometime a Great Notion-. I have been reading slower and slower as I got closer to the end. I can't help but feeling that even more awfulness and brutality is waiting, and I won't be able to bear it, but of course I'll have to, because by this time I'm far too wrapped up in it to walk away... The book has taken on the feeling of some sort of terrible inexorable machine that will continue to grind its way forward with or without me or any of the characters at this point. Somehow, the ending of the story has been ordained, and it is beyond the power of anyone in the story to change or influence its outcome. So Hank Stamper and I are equivalent at this point. Both spectators to what I fear must be his inevitable undoing.

What a book.

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Music: Bob Dylan - Love Sick

Well, I'm still working on -Sometimes a Great Notion-. It's taking me a rather long time to get through it, but that's partly because I was sick most of last week, and not really able to concentrate on much of anything.

Which is a shame, because it's a great book. My father told me that it had been made into a movie, a fact that I find very interesting. It's the kind of book that seems like it would be too big for a movie, too big for the stage, almost too big for anything but Oregon forests where it's set. One of the amazing things about the book is that Kesey has created a back-story for every single character that he introduces, and that they are all treated as equally complex and important, even if the character might be considered peripheral to the story. The thing is, there are no characters that are peripheral to this story. It's the story of a town, and therefore the feelings and perceptions of everyone in the town are part of it. And everyone in the book is so complex... There are no good and bad characters, because it's too complicated for that.

Hmmm. Kind of like life.

It's a good book.

Current Mood: listless
Current Music: patsy cline - crazy

So is it safe to go back to simply reading and writing about what I read again? It seems hard to know how and when to resume real life...

But, putting that aside and stoically resolving to resume real life, I will continue. I finished -Rabbit, Run- which I believe was the last book I mentioned in this journal. It was a very well-crafted book. The protagonist (I was going to call him the hero, but anyone who has read the book will realize that he's much more of an anti-hero than he is a hero) spends most of the book feeling unnerved and at loose ends, and Updike was able to create a situation in which I wound up feeling ill at ease myself while reading the book. I'd be sitting on the train reading on my way home, and only be able to read a few pages at a time because I felt so unsettled. I'm very anxious to go on to the rest of the series.

Not having any of the other Rabbit books to hand, however, I'm currently reading Ken Kesey's -Sometimes a Great Notion-. I'm only about 100 pages in, but I have most definitely been grabbed. So far I have found that Kesey's style is far more sophisticated and interesting in this book than in -One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest-. He has written quite a tangled family story, and narrates the story in an equally tangled style, with plot lines constantly crossing and interweaving, the past and future endlessly overlapping... In some sort of strange way it reminds me a little of -The Sound and the Fury-.

i'm a very very complex person

i try to improve but you see how i worsen

Entries tagged with ken kesey

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