Another contemporary historical fiction, though not a uni-related one. Yee Fui foisted the book on me, mainly (I think) because of my tendency to put 'goldfish' and 'philosophy' in the same sentence - or at least closely adjacent ones - though no doubt also partly because she thought I might enjoy it! It starts off well, but somewhere along the line, it just lost me a little bit, and while I spent a lot of time enjoying and being amused by the quirkiness and craziness (the 'conversations' with the King, for example), and also admiring the craft and representation of history/fiction (the way things circle back and forth, and endings are beginnings are endings and so on), and also being impressed by the audacity of the book and what it attempts (not just its metafictionality, but also the way it works the 'fish' theme), it didn't captivate me in the way that I'd anticipated and I ended up liking rather than loving it.
There are, I think, a few reasons for this response. First, I often find it hard to get past this kind of colloquial language - it hurts me to see ampersands on the page rather than 'and's, and I rarely enjoy reading about shit, piss and other such things (and especially in those words - I can be a bit of a prude about some things, especially when it comes to language). Still, that wouldn't have been a killing blow in itself. Second, I probably didn't read it under ideal circumstances. With the business end of the academic year increasingly looming, this was to be the last substantial non-study reading I was to tackle for a while, and even now it was read in a fairly fragmentary way, meaning that I've probably missed lots of the nuances as well as some of the bigger picture. Third - and this was a bit of a death-blow to my chances of really taking Gould's to heart - despite the distracted nature of my reading, I saw the direction that the book was taking very, very early, so that its subsequent metafictional/historiographical moves came as no kind of revelation but more as 'oh, is that all? I knew that already' type ticking-off of points.
Still, all of that quibbling notwithstanding, my basic reaction of the book is a positive one. It appeals to me on a lot of levels, not least that of being easy to read and hence a fun journey in many respects (which goes some way to making up for my having guessed the eventual destination and many of the signposts along the way all too early). And, as I said, I admire the craft that has gone into its writing, and would reckon it to be, all told, definitely a success. But it wasn't quite the right book for me at this time, and probably there's never been a time in my life at which it would have been right (commingling of fish and philosophy notwithstanding!).
Gould's also made me think that postmodernism may very well be the literary dominant at present, at least in a thematic (as opposed to enacting, or embodying, or something more substantive) fashion (another caveat being that I'm here using 'literary' quite narrowly) - it seems the norm for literature these days to be overtly and self-consciously concerned with itself (language, writing, fiction, etc), even if most examples don't take it as far as Fowles, say, or Pynchon (or, for that matter, Richard Flanagan). Of course, the problem with talking about postmodernism in these terms is that such talk tends, of its nature, to illegitimately flatten out the very idea and reduce it to formal, stylistic elements.
