aemam

Tristan Hughes teaches at my university, and taught my housemate last semester. She's very enthusiastic about him, despite not having read any of his work, so I thought I'd give it a go -- it's in the library, after all, so no problem if it isn't for me. It isn't for me, really, I don't think, but there was still stuff to enjoy there. Funny descriptions, and sometimes very apt descriptions, and scenes that evoked a lot of response. The book is made up of vignettes, most regretful, concerning people's lives in a particular local area, connected to each other by a shared history and geography. The ones that got to me most were the ones about a man going blind and a boy whose father was suffering from PTSD in the wake of fighting in the war. The man who is going blind puts so much importance on what he's done in his life, what he's achieved, and so when he's going blind, he thinks about blinding himself on purpose, before his vision is completely gone... Was he supposed to just wait while it did this, while it took what was left, to sit helpless while it worked on him. The silver so smooth in his hand -- it was in his hands, he could get rid of it now once and for all. Derrick imagined sitting in a darkness that he had made, and that would be forever his own. And then the description of the boy's father's PTSD: It was like some crazed and dementedly reductive dramatist who slashed up men's scripts and burned down their stages and left them with one scene, one act, one single passage, that they were cursed to play out again and again and forever. I really enjoyed some of these images, even if the stories themselves were not what I'd seek out for fun.

2023-06-20 18:17