Saturday, January 29, 2005

I, the Divine: A Novel in First Chapters

Rabih Alameddine

This could have been gimmicky - it's a collection of the first chapters of a woman's repeatedly aborted attempts to write her life's story. She restarts and restarts, at first always in the first person, and then getting more literary, imaginative, fictionalizing, starting not at the beginning but in various places in her life's history, trying to figure out what her story is, and what she wants to talk about, what is important.

It's really fascinating to see something in one chapter that is glossed over in a linear narrative become the focus of the next restart, as if she was reminded of something she wants to talk about - the really amazing thing about this book is that this isn't just the story she's writing down, it's the framework of the story, it's watching the narrator make those decisions in fits and starts. It's also fascinating to see the bits and pieces of the story come together, each chapter enlarging another corner of the picture.

What was distracting, and sometimes irritating was how frequently the prose was just terrible - I'm assuming that's deliberate, a part of the conceit of the narrator's amateur attempts at writing the story. But it was still not always fun to slog through. And it was sometimes frustrating to find yourself in an angle that is fascinating - particularly one of the last first chapters in the book, where we learn more about the grandfather who opens the first first chapter - and realize that it's going to end soon, and wish that this could have been the whole of the book.

And yeah. I wish I had thought of this first. Because I have so many crappy half-finished starts of books, I could have had me a postmodern goddamn masterpiece, by god.

In conclusion: rock on. unfairly.

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