OPEN QUESTION:
This is weighing on me as I just finished my wholly-negative consideration of Joyce's flat "After the Race" from Dubliners, and amidst a casual reading the reputedly terrible The Riddle of the Traveling Skull (full review with photographs coming within a week or so) by the once-famous (quite some time ago and not for so very long) Harry Stephen Keeler.
I can only describe Keeler's book as ecstatically bad. The writing and subject are ridiculous--ridiculous as in freaking absurd--so far over-the-top as to disappear into the stratospheric yellow glare of its own blinding, cloudless hyperbole. Joyce, on the other hand--well, we all know about Joyce.
Keeler's book, as bad as it is, is impossible to put down and virtually trembling--crackling--with that spark of life. I can hardly believe that I'm caring as I do about these absurd characters and their absurder plights. Meanwhile-- Well, read my review of "After the Race."
My functioning definition of the "spark of life" comes from the preface of Yann Martel's Life of Pi.
What is the value of the "Spark of Life" in literature?
This is weighing on me as I just finished my wholly-negative consideration of Joyce's flat "After the Race" from Dubliners, and amidst a casual reading the reputedly terrible The Riddle of the Traveling Skull (full review with photographs coming within a week or so) by the once-famous (quite some time ago and not for so very long) Harry Stephen Keeler.
I can only describe Keeler's book as ecstatically bad. The writing and subject are ridiculous--ridiculous as in freaking absurd--so far over-the-top as to disappear into the stratospheric yellow glare of its own blinding, cloudless hyperbole. Joyce, on the other hand--well, we all know about Joyce.
Keeler's book, as bad as it is, is impossible to put down and virtually trembling--crackling--with that spark of life. I can hardly believe that I'm caring as I do about these absurd characters and their absurder plights. Meanwhile-- Well, read my review of "After the Race."
My functioning definition of the "spark of life" comes from the preface of Yann Martel's Life of Pi.
