Bough Down - By Karen Green
So with my creative writing MFA stint at Otis college of art and Design fully under way, (yes they do have a creative writing department. Go figure...) I've enrolled in one of the discussion based classes with the traditional list of university professor selected works for the semester's reading. This is always a useful exercise, as it forces one to branch out into other forms of literature and readings
that one may have been previously unaware of.
The first book on the list, "Bough Down" by Karen Green, was a title I'd never heard of before at all, nor the author.
Apparently, she was the wife of the acclaimed author David Foster Wallace, author of the famous book "Infinite Jest." Which I'd never read, but have heard of. He unfortunately committed suicide about a decade ago, and she discovered his body hung in their backyard.
So this book is told from her perspective, as she deals with the grief, giving little anecdotes of her life afterwards, with some glimpses back into the marriage,and her discovering of the body, and the fallout afterwards.
It's told in little bite sized chunks, about a paragraph or two in the page, with artwork woven in. It's an experimental format, which comes off like a series of poems in it's formatting. Her artwork is collage based, with a "cut and paste, found memento" type of vibe about it. Such as you might find in someone's personal diary. That does appear to be the overall effect being sought after here, a personal journey presented like the open pages of a diary, though very sharply written.
That being said, the artwork itself, I didn't much care for. It was confusing to look at, even if the designs were pretty enough, I still couldn't gather a sense of why I need to be looking at this. But whatever. It didn't detract from the passages I was reading.
The nice thing about this type of narrative is that the dramatic tension is not in the technicality of the plot itself, but in watching this person live through some seemingly unrelated life events that on the surface appear to have little meaning, but remembering the over arching storm cloud of grief at a lost loved one, have a deeper meaning. We are watching a person re-adjust to a new phase of life, where things you formerly took a certain type of look at, you now take a fresh look at. We're "seeing a person see" one might say, rather than getting caught up in the ins and outs of a technically constructed narrative.
The first book on the list, "Bough Down" by Karen Green, was a title I'd never heard of before at all, nor the author.
Apparently, she was the wife of the acclaimed author David Foster Wallace, author of the famous book "Infinite Jest." Which I'd never read, but have heard of. He unfortunately committed suicide about a decade ago, and she discovered his body hung in their backyard.
So this book is told from her perspective, as she deals with the grief, giving little anecdotes of her life afterwards, with some glimpses back into the marriage,and her discovering of the body, and the fallout afterwards.
It's told in little bite sized chunks, about a paragraph or two in the page, with artwork woven in. It's an experimental format, which comes off like a series of poems in it's formatting. Her artwork is collage based, with a "cut and paste, found memento" type of vibe about it. Such as you might find in someone's personal diary. That does appear to be the overall effect being sought after here, a personal journey presented like the open pages of a diary, though very sharply written.
That being said, the artwork itself, I didn't much care for. It was confusing to look at, even if the designs were pretty enough, I still couldn't gather a sense of why I need to be looking at this. But whatever. It didn't detract from the passages I was reading.
The nice thing about this type of narrative is that the dramatic tension is not in the technicality of the plot itself, but in watching this person live through some seemingly unrelated life events that on the surface appear to have little meaning, but remembering the over arching storm cloud of grief at a lost loved one, have a deeper meaning. We are watching a person re-adjust to a new phase of life, where things you formerly took a certain type of look at, you now take a fresh look at. We're "seeing a person see" one might say, rather than getting caught up in the ins and outs of a technically constructed narrative.
