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A review by wandering_not_lost
The Art of Time in Fiction: As Long as It Takes by Joan Silber
3.0
The main thing that caught me about this book was that a lot of it wasn't so much about time as it was about plot structure and not so much about plot structure as it was about focusing the reader's attention. Which it did well, discussing examples of how to deal with long stretches of time and also how you can focus attention by slowing time down. None of this was particularly new to me, but it was done well.
Also, spoiler alert, if you don't want to read a lot of synopses of tragedies befalling women, might want to skip this one. The examples given, remind me why I haven't read more "classic" literature: almost all the books mentioned were about tragedy (the author states that misspent, ruined, and unled lives are often more interesting, which ahahahahahahaahaha is not a comment that has aged well to this Plague Year, but then again, I have always found tragedy boring), and the overwhelming majority of examples are about tragedies that befall women: they drift through life powerless and miss out, they marry wrongly and are unhappy, they do not marry and are unhappy, they marry and are happy but then their husbands die and they are unhappy, they never marry and become ugly and abrasive suffragists, they die young, they are "ruined" and left in disgrace....:sigh: (This isn't the author's fault - these texts exist, but perhaps she didn't realize the common thread that leapt out from all of her examples.)
Also, spoiler alert, if you don't want to read a lot of synopses of tragedies befalling women, might want to skip this one. The examples given, remind me why I haven't read more "classic" literature: almost all the books mentioned were about tragedy (the author states that misspent, ruined, and unled lives are often more interesting, which ahahahahahahaahaha is not a comment that has aged well to this Plague Year, but then again, I have always found tragedy boring), and the overwhelming majority of examples are about tragedies that befall women: they drift through life powerless and miss out, they marry wrongly and are unhappy, they do not marry and are unhappy, they marry and are happy but then their husbands die and they are unhappy, they never marry and become ugly and abrasive suffragists, they die young, they are "ruined" and left in disgrace....:sigh: (This isn't the author's fault - these texts exist, but perhaps she didn't realize the common thread that leapt out from all of her examples.)