{"id":13551,"date":"2022-03-31T18:46:11","date_gmt":"2022-03-31T17:46:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cassandravoices.com\/?p=13551"},"modified":"2022-03-31T18:46:11","modified_gmt":"2022-03-31T17:46:11","slug":"fiction-readers-block","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/2022\/03\/31\/fiction-readers-block\/","title":{"rendered":"Fiction Reader\u2019s Block"},"content":{"rendered":"

We all see things with different eyes and it gets you nowhere hoping that one in a thousand will see things your way.<\/em> <\/span>
\nJ. L. Carr, A Month in the Country <\/em>(1980).<\/span><\/p>\n

In his droll 1999 essay, \u2018Reader\u2019s Block<\/a><\/span>\u2019, Geoff Dyer describes suffering from what he calls a creeping condition whereby he finds himself staring blankly at his bookshelves noting all the books he hasn\u2019t read and thinking \u201cthere\u2019s nothing left to read\u201d.<\/p>\n

Such was Dyer\u2019s malady that even so-called \u201cquality fiction\u201d seemed a waste of time. He was forty-one. Back in his twenties he had imagined he would spend his middle age reading the books he didn\u2019t have the patience to read when he was young. But it was not to be, and now he found himself resigned to leafing through the pages of the in-flight magazine when traveling abroad rather than reading the books he brought for the journey.<\/p>\n

Being roughly the same age as Dyer, I identified wholly with his piece back then, and in a way still do. But my malady, my \u201creader\u2019s block\u201d, is more specific: it was fiction that got on my nerves at the onset of middle age, and years later it still does. I don\u2019t suffer from reader\u2019s block, but rather fiction reader\u2019s block, or to be more precise, novel reader\u2019s block.<\/p>\n

Occasionally some fiction does slip through the net. Jennifer Potter and Ferdinand Dennis are on my bedside table alongside the handful of old favourites that I occasionally revisit: Sam Selvon, Chester Himes, Shelagh Delaney, Stuart Dybek, W.G.Sebald and Ann Quin. But it is to non-fiction that I mostly turn and have done for over twenty years.<\/p>\n

Currently I\u2019m engrossed in Patrick Wright\u2019s monumental The Sea View Has Me Again<\/em>, an extraordinary telling of the German writer Uwe Johnson\u2019s lost decade on the Isle of Sheppey.\u00a0 Johnson drank himself to death in bleak surrounds of the Sheerness Sea View Hotel in the 1984.<\/p>\n

But what is this affliction? It\u2019s not laziness or distraction, nor the inability to concentrate on anything that doesn\u2019t offer immediate gratification. Patrick Wright\u2019s multi-layered opus is a densely packed seven hundred page micro-history of both Sheppey and Uwe\u2019s self- exile, and is not remotely daunting. Likewise, Speak, Silence, <\/em>Carole Angier\u2019s detailed study of Sebald\u2019s life and work comes in at over six hundred pages, and is not a page too long in my view.<\/p>\n

In interviews the highly-regarded contemporary writers Kevin Barry and Rob Doyle can be interesting, but the preoccupations they display in their fictions are those of young men and are of no interest to me at all at my stage in life.<\/p>\n

Now to be sure, I\u2019m of the wrong demographic for Sally Rooney<\/a><\/span> or Nicole Flattery, but I can\u2019t hack the imagined worlds of the Colm Toibins or John Banvilles either \u2013 in form and content they\u2019re just not my cup of tea. It is of course a question of taste, but I can\u2019t abide the narrative armature of story-driven literary fiction with those wretched character arcs \u2013 as Shakespeare fully understood, people do not change.<\/p>\n

\n

Mark Venner evokes 1970s England, a time of Bronco toilet rolls and King Crimson albums, when Jack Russell terriers still snapped at the coal man's feet.https:\/\/t.co\/SPLJSrswV0<\/a>@broadsheet_ie<\/a> @IlsaCarter1<\/a> @EdwardClarke20<\/a> @hisonlysonnet<\/a> @wadeinthewate11 @NMcDevitt<\/a> @FutureVisions5<\/a><\/p>\n

— CassandraVoices (@VoicesCassandra) January 14, 2021<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n