Word: novelizations
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This is the story of Eric Kraft's novel Flying (Picador; 581 pages). And of course, Peter's "full and frank disclosure" is much more a Proustian exercise in creative recollection than a marshaling of the facts. After all, Peter is an imaginative soul, and he knows it--that's what got him into this mess in the first place. "When you are a seat-of-the-pants memoirist," he writes, "you don't write about your life; you live your memoirs. You begin to feel that you and your account of yourself are one, like a mythical beast...
...most part, Flying is a reminder of how entertaining a novel can be when it slips the surly bonds of realism. Kraft's characters don't talk like people actually talk. They're more witty, more astute, and they express themselves with infinitely more pizazz. This is true even of Peter's winged steed, the charmingly anthropomorphized Spirit of Babbington, which may not be an ace at lifting off but proves a surprisingly excellent road buddy. The effect is like a happy-go-lucky Nabokov, with all the road-tripping wordplay and none of the incest...
...with words is Kraft's project too. The source of the plans for Peter's aerocycle is a do-it-yourself magazine called Impractical Craftsman--an inspired title for the age of armchair American ingenuity and, not incidentally, a nifty description of a fiction writer. On paper, a novel about hope, nostalgia, love, disillusionment, pataphysics and the science of lift might seem like a hopelessly overdetermined bucket of bolts, an aerodynamic impossibility. But Kraft's affectionately satirical, buoyant language makes Flying soar...
When I was in college, a friend of mine pressed with great urgency a copy of a slim little novel into my hands, as if he were aware it would satiate a hunger I didn't know I had. That book was Season of Migration to the North, by the Sudanese writer Tayeb Salih, who passed away in London on Feb. 18 at 80. I had been writing for some time by then, but Salih's perceptive assessment of the relationship between East and West, his complex weaving of personal and political lives, and the beauty of his prose redefined...
...North is about one man's journey from Sudan to England and his return seven years later to find that everything and everyone, including him, has changed. To make matters worse, someone else in his village has undertaken the same voyage before him--with tragic consequences. Salih's other novels include The Wedding of Zein and the Bandarshah stories, although none of them inspired the kind of devotion that Season evokes in its readers. Like my college friend, I have over the years recommended the novel to dozens of people, who in turn have done the same...