The Book of Strange New Things Review
I started reading The Book of Strange New Things (Faber, 2014) without knowing this week’s topic in Deepening Fiction (Nyren and Stone, 2005). One of my first thoughts was: “I feel this as if it was my own experience”. I, too, have prayed at Heathrow International Airport Chapel before going to a Christian mission in Africa without having an end date, so I felt directly identified with Peter Leigh, the protagonist. But one of the most important thoughts that I had was: “I should do this. Write about what I know. Go back to my own memories to share from there. I don't need to ‘invent the black thread’ of my story.” The surprise came when I found that the topic of Deepening Fiction was precisely “Discovering the Story Subject: the Matter of the Subject”. That chapter relates the difference between theme and subject, and in general: what do we write about.
In Mexico inventar el hilo negro is when you create something from scratch, thinking that you are finding something new, usually feeling that it is the ultimate truth , only to discover later on that someone else did it before, that what you did already existed.
When I was in the airport with Peter reading the Visitors Book (26) I remembered doing the same thing about seven years ago. “How could have Faber created such a realistic scene in the book?”
After reading the first section of “Discovering the Story’s Subject” chapter of Deepening Fiction, (114) I realized that that’s what it’s all about, to not be afraid of sharing stories from your own history, details that are in my memory. To find the appropriate distance from them and just present them from and for my story. This was a major epiphany moment in the whole semester. I don't need to tell the most tragic, successful or recent experience. We don't necessarily need to tell “The Story” that we want to share with the world, but those little observations that are recorded in our memory, those small details of life that remain in ourselves and made us have a deep understanding of life, and from there, we will show subtly our personal, let’s say, cosmogony.
Nyren and Stone say that when we start writing “the most familiar subject matter may be our current experiences, which feel both urgent and authentic” (114) but the risk of this close approach in our first tries is that since the matters are so personal and close to the writer, it will be hard to make it interesting for others. But the discovering process of our matter can continue and we can go to the other extreme, trying to explore something completely different from us, making our stories feel forced (114).
What Michael Faber had experienced in his personal life with Christian missionaries, nurses, cats, or harvesting is not irrelevant. Maybe he used some of his previous experience as a nurse, back in Sidney, his personal learnings on migration, or all his different experiences in marriages to build his novel (Michel Faber: 'I would have been a different writer without my wife’, The Guardian, 2016), but what is more important, is the vision of humanity that he is trying to share within his work.
Under the story of a failed interplanetary mission, Faber is criticizing the fall of the empire of human universalization. Using non-realistic fiction is possible to tune our attention to “domestic ordinariness” (Stone, Nyren 128). “The strangeness of the situational subject matter provides a vehicle for the psychological subject matter rather than displacing it” (128). If we analyze the transformation of Joshua from the cat sleeping peacefully (17) to “Joshua is becoming VERY neurotic” (314), until he is put down after the accident or his leg and the torture of the children (393), we can see the fatality of destiny, the tragedy.
Milan Kundera shares in his Dialogue on The Art of the Novel that “the code of this or that characters is made up of certain key words” (qtd. in Stone, 117). If we had to find Peter’s code we surely had to incorporate words such as: destiny, compassion, sacrifice, community, and truth.
As I mentioned, this chapter was really useful to approach to my work. I have explored both extremes of distance to the subject matter of my writing. My fiction had been so far, artificial and plastic, characters built of rock and wood, and my poetry so personal, intimate and prosaic, that I feel it is time to start looking for something more balanced. Yesterday night I had a call with a friend that writes historic fiction. He gave me really great advice: “Take any idea from any book, something that you want to explore, but don't do the exploration by yourself. Let your characters do that exploration for you. You will learn a lot from them”. And I think doing that, I will little by little start finding the themes that I want to write about, or maybe I have the themes,
In Mexico inventar el hilo negro is when you create something from scratch, thinking that you are finding something new, usually feeling that it is the ultimate truth , only to discover later on that someone else did it before, that what you did already existed.
When I was in the airport with Peter reading the Visitors Book (26) I remembered doing the same thing about seven years ago. “How could have Faber created such a realistic scene in the book?”
After reading the first section of “Discovering the Story’s Subject” chapter of Deepening Fiction, (114) I realized that that’s what it’s all about, to not be afraid of sharing stories from your own history, details that are in my memory. To find the appropriate distance from them and just present them from and for my story. This was a major epiphany moment in the whole semester. I don't need to tell the most tragic, successful or recent experience. We don't necessarily need to tell “The Story” that we want to share with the world, but those little observations that are recorded in our memory, those small details of life that remain in ourselves and made us have a deep understanding of life, and from there, we will show subtly our personal, let’s say, cosmogony.
Nyren and Stone say that when we start writing “the most familiar subject matter may be our current experiences, which feel both urgent and authentic” (114) but the risk of this close approach in our first tries is that since the matters are so personal and close to the writer, it will be hard to make it interesting for others. But the discovering process of our matter can continue and we can go to the other extreme, trying to explore something completely different from us, making our stories feel forced (114).
What Michael Faber had experienced in his personal life with Christian missionaries, nurses, cats, or harvesting is not irrelevant. Maybe he used some of his previous experience as a nurse, back in Sidney, his personal learnings on migration, or all his different experiences in marriages to build his novel (Michel Faber: 'I would have been a different writer without my wife’, The Guardian, 2016), but what is more important, is the vision of humanity that he is trying to share within his work.
Under the story of a failed interplanetary mission, Faber is criticizing the fall of the empire of human universalization. Using non-realistic fiction is possible to tune our attention to “domestic ordinariness” (Stone, Nyren 128). “The strangeness of the situational subject matter provides a vehicle for the psychological subject matter rather than displacing it” (128). If we analyze the transformation of Joshua from the cat sleeping peacefully (17) to “Joshua is becoming VERY neurotic” (314), until he is put down after the accident or his leg and the torture of the children (393), we can see the fatality of destiny, the tragedy.
Milan Kundera shares in his Dialogue on The Art of the Novel that “the code of this or that characters is made up of certain key words” (qtd. in Stone, 117). If we had to find Peter’s code we surely had to incorporate words such as: destiny, compassion, sacrifice, community, and truth.
As I mentioned, this chapter was really useful to approach to my work. I have explored both extremes of distance to the subject matter of my writing. My fiction had been so far, artificial and plastic, characters built of rock and wood, and my poetry so personal, intimate and prosaic, that I feel it is time to start looking for something more balanced. Yesterday night I had a call with a friend that writes historic fiction. He gave me really great advice: “Take any idea from any book, something that you want to explore, but don't do the exploration by yourself. Let your characters do that exploration for you. You will learn a lot from them”. And I think doing that, I will little by little start finding the themes that I want to write about, or maybe I have the themes,
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