Brain Pain discussion

This discussion covers Castling –thru- Speedboat, pg. 7 – 89


I think sanity, however, is the most profound moral option of our time.

I'm finishing up another book but this is next up for me - I look forward to joining the discussion later this week.

Jen wrote: "I'm finishing up another book but this is next up for me - I look forward to joining the discussion later this week."

I finished the first segment this morning. I can't quite articulate why, but I'm finding the book to be very exciting! She has a roving eye and ear, but also mixes in her own internal stuff. Very different from anything I've read before.

I'm also planning to join you all, but probably at the beginning of October. I'm pleased to see an initial positive reaction from Jim. :)

I've read the first three chapters. Like Jim, I'm finding it very different from anything I've read before. I kept reading parts out loud to my husband. There is something exciting about it. I think it may be the sense of immediacy it gives the reader.

Wow! Now I'm definitely looking forward to starting this.

I read the section section, Quiet, last night. It differed a lot from the first section, Castling.

Castling was like a kind of cab ride through Adler's psyche where we could look out the windows and see and hear her observations and catch snippets of ideas and conversations, and unusual happenings. One snippet not necessarily related to the snippets before and after, but somehow, still part of the same cab ride.

Quiet has a similar feel in terms of territory covered, but now the passages are longer, and some are semi-continuous, starting with subject A, then bouncing into subject B for a moment, then back to A, and a bit of C, and a concluding shot of A - in general, closer to a "normal" narrative flow, but still different from what we'd expect in a novel.

For those of you who may have read ahead, is the book feeling like a cohesive "novel", or a collection of stories, or maybe creative "essays"? It's kind of hard to put this book in a particular box, at this point.

I am in the middle of the chapter called "Speedboat." It proceeds in much the manner you describe, with perhaps a bit more continuity. The excitement seems to be building with each chapter. It's not really feeling like a cohesive novel, but it all seems to hang together and nothing seems out of place. It just doesn't fit any existing label I can come up with.

I read Brownstone last night, which moves into the microcosm of people in an apartment building and how they interact. Increasing narrative continuity as the stories progress, but still leaning towards the surreal-mundane.

Read Speedboat. Strong sense of the chaos and confusion of late-60's early-70's America. The discomfort of trying to break from conformity, but discovering that maybe form is what holds back chaos...

Jim wrote: "Read Speedboat. Strong sense of the chaos and confusion of late-60's early-70's America. The discomfort of trying to break from conformity, but discovering that maybe form is what holds back chaos..."

Nicely put. I was having trouble deciding how a university faculty meeting fit in with speedboats and airplanes.

I'm finally up to...the end of Castling. It's weirdly engaging. I was trying to describe it to my husband and ended up saying that it's almost entirely plotless, but matter of fact about its plotlessness. It's not like pretentious or self-aware or consciously experimental, it's like it's just happy to meander along with no plot as though that were a totally normal way to proceed.

I guess I'll see what develops since people are saying it gets more cohesive.

I was slow to get started and I read up to Quiet last night. I'm enjoying this a great deal and it cements for me that I do enjoy stream of consciousness style writing, though this is not quite that. I read somewhere (the afterword, probably, to my edition, which I read first) that Adler says she approached this with a series of anecdotes in mind. But as she wrote the anecdotes something would happen and she'd find that she cut them off before they reached their conclusions. No real explanation for why this happened, but it does explain the disjointed and often abrupt style of the passages.