Friday, March 14, 2003
I’m repeatedly struck by the grace under pressure of Michael Cunningham’s fiction. I have yet to read The Hours; I don’t want to commit to purchasing it until I’ve read it once, first. I’ve read most of his other novels, however, and they’re grand. The utmost of them is his 1995 masterpiece Flesh and Blood, a travel through 50+ years, from Greece to the U.S., from hetero to homo, male to female, all held together by the tenacious threads of Cunningham’s prose, such as this sentence:
”Mary was assembling a rabbit-shaped Easter cake according to the instructions in a magazine, cutting ears and a tail from a layer of yellow cake round and placidly innocent as a nursery moon.”
“…a layer of yellow cake round and placidly innocent as a nursery moon.” !!! Not only is that writing so clear, so deft as to nearly render everyone else irrelevant, it’s so poetically visual. You see the cake. You think of cake. I’m also reminded of the ultimate in “nursery moon,” the book Goodnight Moon, which I read pathologically up until age 7 or so.
A good soundtrack for Flesh and Blood: Everything but the Girl’s “Good Cop Bad Cop.”
”Mary was assembling a rabbit-shaped Easter cake according to the instructions in a magazine, cutting ears and a tail from a layer of yellow cake round and placidly innocent as a nursery moon.”
“…a layer of yellow cake round and placidly innocent as a nursery moon.” !!! Not only is that writing so clear, so deft as to nearly render everyone else irrelevant, it’s so poetically visual. You see the cake. You think of cake. I’m also reminded of the ultimate in “nursery moon,” the book Goodnight Moon, which I read pathologically up until age 7 or so.
A good soundtrack for Flesh and Blood: Everything but the Girl’s “Good Cop Bad Cop.”
# posted by Thomas : 4:37 PM
