"Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living. The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind."
Over at the Fictionaut blog, Matt Briggs fine series, Rediscovered Reading, takes a look back at Dawn Raffel's first book. Her story collection, In the Year of Long Division, was published by Knopf back in 1995, and it has the same traits that makes Raffel's current work so interesting. In Briggs' words:Each story is a feat of prose style, too. They accomplish the
improbable task of discovering a way of writing something that matches
her subject. She uses sentence fragments and run-ons. She omits names,
preferring sometimes pronouns, letters, and generic names like Mother
and Father.It's not a difficult book to find. If you're reading this, you seemingly have internet access, which means you can find www.abebooks.com pretty easily. It's well worth your time, as is looking a copy of her follow-up title, the novel, Carrying the Body.My suggestion? Go find these books, read them, fall in love with Raffel's work and by then, her forthcoming title, Further Adventures in the Restless Universe, will be close enough to available (March 2010, Dzanc Books) to keep your excitement level up!
In some languages, as in English and French, the modern freezing of spelling has removed the writing more and more from pronunciation and has resulted in the need to teach spelling and the growth of fallacies like the "silent" letter (a letter is really either the symbol of a sound or it is unnecessary).