Poor Traits of an Artist as a Young Man: The Blue

For a table of contents of the entire series, click here. 

I was exhausted with trying to chase success when I approached The Blue. It was time to write another book, but I was sick of trying to bend to trends. That only led me to failure.

So I wrote what I wanted to write. My most personal book, my simplest in many ways. An adult literary drama, postmodern and existential. Inspired chiefly by Camus’ The Stranger.

It is a book that contains my deepest fears and insights on humans and human interaction. The Blue follows the path of Derek, an alcoholic and struggling painter who finds himself stricken with face-blindness, a real disability in which the sufferer cannot recognize anyone by their appearance. Not even themselves.

Isolated by his condition, Derek finds himself in the center of a legal battle of the death of a family – he’s hunted by them, ostracized, and left struggling with the nature of reality itself.

Another great Greg Poszywak cover. You can get your own copy of The Blue as either a paperback or an e-book by clicking here. 

It is my shortest book, at around 50,000 words. I also further developed my style; rather than the flashback/forward structure of [sic], I wrote in one uninterrupted first-person narrative. The reader lives the book with the narrator.

The Blue is my choppiest book, in that I stayed away from semi-colons and dashes but stuck with small, simple sentences. It’s a divisive style, and it will bother some people. Others love it, and my biggest fans tend to swear by The Blue as my best work.

I love it, though. I’m happy to take stylistic risks. The Blue is probably my personal favorite of my novels. The reviews are mixed, but then the reviews are mixed on some of what I consider to be the greatest books ever written. This is the sort of novel that speaks to me the most.

For the next entry in the Poor Traits series, click here.