Word: giffords
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Using the photo-cinematic method, Gifford composes his novel as a carefully arranged series of short takes moving between past and present, memory and event, reality and hallucination. It's literary impressionism, splicing silent and often motionless pictures together into a frame containing only the essential, electric excerpts of life. These panels, the charged, memorable exposures of life in Franz Hall's mind, are rendered in 85 well-cropped and vivid chapters. Two whole adjoining chapters read as follows...
...GIFFORD MAKES the analogy many others have, that the mind's eye is a camera eye, but produces a more compelling work than most other practitioners of that method have managed. Mental stills and short scenes add up to a movie that is consciousness, one strangely edited into a million flashbacks and jump cuts that we hardly understand. And though the method and theory are elaborate, the editing remains extreme. Stripping down, distilling, cutting, Gifford leaves only the crucial frames, economizing to the point of crypticness...
This same minimalism characterizes the prose. Gifford has cleared away the fatuousness and swagger that disfigures the writing of most young writers, leaving a terse prose that is controlled and accurate and clean to a degree that rivals Hemingway and Camus. Gifford describes the world cooly, and precisely, yet always loads the prose with feeling. His lyrical economy haunts us like the voices of our dreams; somehow it all stands out. There is something undeniable about sentences like this...
...Though Gifford works it all into a tense, private nightmare using a narration derived in part from Hemingway, the reader never feels that his fixed state and slightly withdrawn I've-been-through-hell voice are chic affectations adopted to suit the role of Tough Young American Novelist. He avoids the stylized macho disillusionment that characterizes much Hemingway imitation--and for that matter, much of Hemingway. His voice, with its tightlipped, overwrought intensity, is a voice terse enough for the end of the world. He and his characters, uptight and dream-ridden, have stared into the intolerable darkness...
Every clipped sentence Gifford gets out is noteworthy. Despite Port Tropique's out-of-the-ordinary double intent--to tell an adventure story while creating a work of art--it is a book capable of electrifying a much larger audience than its small press publication might indicate. Gifford will be a voice for the decade...