this was so delightful to read—I love how you described the exuberantly committed placefulness of the novel, how detailed and present the marsh is
this especially was such a great articulation and makes me want to revisit other literature that’s very local, where the environment is always present in the thoughts and actions of characters:
“The payoff, I think, of writing about a real-place, is that the unfreedom, the tethering, to that place means you reach for your references and ideas and words and characters within that place—you reach deeper, rather than elsewhere. If things in the universe of the unreal real come easily to hand, imaginatively summoned from wherever they are, imparting a sense of ease and freedom, things in the real cycle and recur. Writing about life in a place—and this is the point of Énard’s novel—is also writing about death, about time, and about history.”
this was so delightful to read—I love how you described the exuberantly committed placefulness of the novel, how detailed and present the marsh is
this especially was such a great articulation and makes me want to revisit other literature that’s very local, where the environment is always present in the thoughts and actions of characters:
“The payoff, I think, of writing about a real-place, is that the unfreedom, the tethering, to that place means you reach for your references and ideas and words and characters within that place—you reach deeper, rather than elsewhere. If things in the universe of the unreal real come easily to hand, imaginatively summoned from wherever they are, imparting a sense of ease and freedom, things in the real cycle and recur. Writing about life in a place—and this is the point of Énard’s novel—is also writing about death, about time, and about history.”