Continuing the break…

Hey folks.  You’ve probably noticed I haven’t been around a lot lately and the truth is I’m just not ready to come back.  It’s been nice being off the internet for the past week and I’d like to keep it that way for a little while longer.  I’ll see you in a week or so!

Legend of a Suicide by David Vann:Ichthyology

I received Legend of a Suicide from TLC Book Tours with little knowledge of what it was about, and though I haven’t finished reading it yet, I wanted to share with you what the reading experience has been like for the first story, “Ichthyology”.  I don’t really do a whole lot of interpreting on this blog; this is a place mainly for talking about the way I react to a book, about what worked and what didn’t, not necessarily what the symbols are.  That’s what I do at school, and so maybe I’m still just in school mode, or maybe it’s because short stories just naturally lend themselves to interpretation because there is less text and more imagination, but when I read “Ichthyology”, I couldn’t help looking things up and trying to interpret the story.

In the story, a young boy’s mother and father split up and the mother and son move to California.  When things get bad, the story is always related to fish.  Hence the title, Ichthyology, or the study of fish.  First, the boy goes on trips with his father fishing and it is his job to make sure the fish don’t jump out of the boat, smashing their heads in with hammers.  When his father and mother are fighting one night, he sneaks into someone else’s home and becomes mesmerized by their fish tank.  He feeds the fish pickles.  In California, he gets his own fish tank and the entire world, as he says, lives within that fish tank.

And this is where the story both succeeds and fails.  It succeeds because this is a beautiful setup.  The story has naturally progressed to this point where fish have obviously been an important part of the narrator’s life and have now become even more so.  There are tragic things happening in the narrator’s life. They need to be explained, they can be explained with the tank.  In this regard, it works completely.  But here also is the problem, what lessons about life are actually learned in the fish tank do not necessarily seem to equal what is going on in the real world.  There is nothing in the fish tank that says metaphor.  It is just a fish tank and life is just life.  I wanted something more.  I wanted more about the narrator’s life, about what was happening, about why this fish tank was so important and became such an influential way for him to see the world.  He tells us that “everything in human life was to be found in that tank”, but never shows us that.

So what does that bode for the rest of the collection?  I hope that the stories that follow have an equally compelling premise and then follow through on them.  Keep an eye out for reviews of the rest of the short stories in Legend of a Suicide.

Thank you to TLC Book Tours for sending me a copy of this book.

Will return soon –

Let me tell you a story.  So I sat down at my computer to finally start writing the final paper I have due on Wednesday and then I thought, “Oh, hey, that blog I have.  I haven’t blogged there in a while.  What if people forget about me?!  What if no one remembers me?!  What will I doooooooooo?”  Then I pouted for a while because I haven’t read a book to post about in forever, so I decided that I should write a Will Return post.  THEN I looked through toothpaste for dinner for a relevant comic.  Good thing I found one that was only posted in February.  I only wasted an hour or so.

So I’m going to try and be a good student here and put the blog on hold for a while.  I have a tour or two coming up and will be posting them.  As for regular blogging?  Will return in two weeks.

PS.  Random!  I have an old iPod photo that I want to sell.  I couldn’t really find any pricing info online, so best offer!  I thought I’d offer it to you guys first.  Shoot me an email or leave a comment.