Read Women discussion

Discussion for the 'Eyes' section.

Section starting with: 'Ho this is a mighty twisting thing...'

Finished 'Eyes' (the first section in my book).

Took a good few pages to get into - I think the way the narrator 'fades in' and out of existence at the beginning and end by far the weakest parts, so the first few pages left a pretty bad first impression that left me dreading how the rest would go. But once I got into the story (once the character started telling it properly) I actually enjoyed it a lot.

I don't want to call the writing 'experimental', cause I'm not sure it is, but it's definitely not standard. No speech marks, limited full stops, colons used to indicate breaths in a sentence, and numbers written in numbers rather than spelt out (that was the 1 I found most jarring!).

I'm not sure Francescho's story first makes for the easiest reading - if you haven't read the blurb or any book reviews it does take a while to work out what the hell is going on. But I think it's definitely affecting my perception of the overall story, even while I understand that that's what it's doing.

Part of that's the automatic assumption that the first character you meet in a novel is going to be both important and 'real'. So with Eyes first you get the story of a renaissance artist, followed by the modern story of George seeing the artists fresco's and beginning to wondering about their life (which has mostly been forgotten). It can be read as the story of what history doesn't record, all the remarkable lives and stories and people that we never get to know about because nothing written down (if anything ever was) survives. By reading Fracescho's story as 'real' it also challenges what we take for granted about history - including that everything remarkable was achieved by men, and that acceptance of gender and LGBT 'issues' are a modern thing.

Reading George's story now though (not quite finished yet), I'm very aware that if I had read it first, I would perceive Francescho's story very differently, as merely the daydreams of a modern girl trying to imagine a life for a painter that not much is known about - in which case the whole Francescho narrative is actually all about George, and what it is she is needing or receiving from imagining the story.


It's interesting. I still find some of the dialogue immensely pompous and pretentious in places, but once I got used to the style of the book it is much less 'awards bait' than I was fearing when I started reading.