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Reading Wednesday
Dec. 8th, 2021 05:39 pmCurrently reading/just finished: In Search of April Raintree by Beatrice Culleton Mosionier. I'm reading the critical edition, which includes the unabridged novel and essays analyzing it. So while I'm finished the book, I have one or two essays left, which I'll probably read tonight.
There's a lot to unpack here. Spoilers for a book that's almost four decades old, I guess?
( trigger warnings: alcohol/drugs, racism, sexual violence, suicide )
The book is in April's first person POV. There's a weird amount of emphasis in the critical essays about the "artlessness" of the prose, which strikes me as interesting. It's true in that the prose is very flat and straightforward, but while that was apparently exceptional in YA literature in 1983, it's so standard in contemporary YA that this wouldn't have stood out to me at all. Today's teenagers aren't expected to have to unpack a metaphor while parsing out a story, but I guess they were back then.The literary value is all in complexities of identity and theme and the author's refusal to tie up these complexities in a straightforward message or moral. It's unsettling and uncomfortable to read. For me, that artlessness seems very intentional, as the work of an author unwilling to pull punches or soften the brutal racism in metaphor or allusion.
One of the essays mentioned that in the version edited for teenage readers, they have expunged the graphic sexual assault scene but not the slurs. Which says a lot about what's acceptable in polite Canadian society, really.
At any rate, I feel like it was a deficiency on my part that I hadn't read it, and I am glad to have corrected that deficiency.
There's a lot to unpack here. Spoilers for a book that's almost four decades old, I guess?
( trigger warnings: alcohol/drugs, racism, sexual violence, suicide )
The book is in April's first person POV. There's a weird amount of emphasis in the critical essays about the "artlessness" of the prose, which strikes me as interesting. It's true in that the prose is very flat and straightforward, but while that was apparently exceptional in YA literature in 1983, it's so standard in contemporary YA that this wouldn't have stood out to me at all. Today's teenagers aren't expected to have to unpack a metaphor while parsing out a story, but I guess they were back then.The literary value is all in complexities of identity and theme and the author's refusal to tie up these complexities in a straightforward message or moral. It's unsettling and uncomfortable to read. For me, that artlessness seems very intentional, as the work of an author unwilling to pull punches or soften the brutal racism in metaphor or allusion.
One of the essays mentioned that in the version edited for teenage readers, they have expunged the graphic sexual assault scene but not the slurs. Which says a lot about what's acceptable in polite Canadian society, really.
At any rate, I feel like it was a deficiency on my part that I hadn't read it, and I am glad to have corrected that deficiency.
