Just finished Case Histories by Kate Atkinson, the Litblog Co-op's Summer 2005 Read This! selection. Which I liked. I did. I liked it. And probably wouldn't have read it otherwise, without that recommendation behind it. So.
That said. It's a strange book. I guess it's a mystery with a literary bent; a mystery literary novel, or a literary mystery novel. Whatever. Genre is crap. Take away a handful of conventions from any genre--the private investigator replaced with a guy, the alien races replaced with "other" people, the footnotes and self-referentiality replaced with focus on the tale itself--and all good books are good stories, each with their own ways about getting at bigger things. And I've found as much entertainment, though of differing types, in Stephen King and Fyodor Dostoevsky; don't let anybody suggest that thinking deep thoughts isn't essentially entertainment. Maybe that's all some weird inverted literary snobbery of mine, but whatever. I think it's true.
That said, I don't typically read mysteries. (But aren't all stories, at heart, mysteries? Don't we want to know whodunnit, though in the broader sense of why--why are these things, these things?) So I can't really say how this book deals with the conventions typical to that genre. There's a private investigator (who chain smokes). I can say that someone does get cracked in the back of the head with the butt of a gun. I can say that there are murders and missing people cases to be solved. There are plot twists. Several red herrings. There's even an explosion, which, conveyed in two short sentences, is one of the strangely funniest parts of the book. Beyond all that--can't say much of value.
What I can speak semi-(semi-semi-semi-)intelligently about is the literary merits of the book. There are literary merits to this book. Whew, that was easy. (Really good writing, by the way. Sort of an occasional fluidity to the prose that reminded of that of Paradise by A.L. Kennedy. Not in the same full-throttle way as Paradise though--just hints of it, here and there; a sort of recognition that a slippery sentence can occasionally be far more tightly compelling than the sharply-defined one. (This, of course, makes far more sense in my head, by the way.))
If I sounded troubled when I said before that I liked the book, it's because I am troubled about it, in that I did like it, even though the book left me feeling troubled. It's an odd book. Though I feel like most everything is wrapped up by the end of the story, I'm still left feeling like I missed major things--which might be related to that impulse to need to re-read the book shortly after reading it the first time that I believe one of the back-cover blurbs mentions. On the one hand, that might all just be me being a flawed reader; on the other hand, it might be right where the book wants me, the bum off the street reader, to be. I suspect this book is pointing towards stories where the plot lines (as there are more than one) can be concluded, but the ideas and thoughts and reactions generated by those plot lines, not so much. Or maybe that in reaching towards conclusions we leave swarmy messes in our wakes; a book itself might be a search for meaning, or a way of imposing structure onto chaos, but when you (say, for example) build a buckyball out of Jenga blocks and chewing gum, some of the construction's left to be completed in the viewer's mind. There's beauty in the breakdown, and all that jazz.
Or, you know, maybe it's just a damn good book, and sometimes damn good books linger in the mind. Whatever. Good choice, LBC. I look forward to reading future selections.
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