Just read Carlos Luis Zafon’s “The Angel’s Game” [ISBN 978-0753826447]. I quite enjoyed “The Shadow of the Wind” but I actually enjoyed this more. Maybe I’ll go back and re-read “The Shadow of the Wind” now. Both books are set in Barcelona (which I’ve never visited but is definitely on my wish list….) and both have a strong flavour of mystery about them.
At times I found “The Angel’s Game” a bit confusing, but it’s that slipping into magical realism, and interweaving of imaginary and “real” even within the context of fiction that brings both the confusion and the dream-like quality. There’s plenty of evidence that this is exactly what the book’s “about”…
All interpretation or observation of reality is necessarily fiction.
and
Everything is a tale, Martin. What we believe, what we know, what we remember, even what we dream. Everything is a story, a narrative, a sequence of events with characters communicating an emotional content. We only accept as true what can be narrated.
That first quote is provocative of course, but it does remind us that all of our experience of “reality” is a creative act. Michael Frayn’s “The Human Touch” describes this beautifully. How do we experience reality without our subjectivity? We don’t. Our senses, our imagination and our memory and perpetually active in creating what we observe, what we know.
The second quote reminds me of Richard Kearney’s “On Stories“. This point often pops into my mind when I encounter someone who thinks rationalism is about “data” or “facts” and fails to acknowledge the narrative they tell to convey their interpretation of reality.
One more…..
It is impossible to survive in a prolonged state of reality, at least for a human being. We spend a good part of our lives dreaming, especially when we’re awake.
Hear T S Eliot there? “Human kind cannot bear very much reality”
To sum up, I like a book which makes me think. I like one which is well written and really stimulates my imagination so that I “see” the places and events. And I also enjoy a page turner. “The Angel’s Game” hits all three buttons for me!
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