Thursday, March 26, 2009
The Final Book...
I have not finished The Garneau Block as of yet but I am enjoying it thus far. The writing is intelligent but unpretentious. The only real problem I have with the novel so far is that because it is soooo descriptive and much of it refers to parts of the city I’m familiar with, I have trouble creating an emotional tie to the book and “seeing” myself in the story. I think we may have discussed this in class today but mostly I think people were saying that because it’s set in Edmonton it is easier to identify with the story and characters. I cannot do this because the world Babiuk has created is so complete and without any room for interpretation and use of imagination (in my opinion) that I can’t fit into it. It’s hard to see aspects of my life in the novel despite the story taking place where I live. Maybe this view will change as I continue reading but so far, this is a story about strangers in unfamiliar places doing things I cannot entirely relate to.
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When I read the novel, I felt that the details served to develop the characters, and that allowed me to relate to them more. After learning so much about them, I saw them as real people. Being familiar with places Babiak writes about was great, but I felt the characters were what really made the story. This goes along with the theory that people make up the place. Although Babiak's novel is centered around a specific geographic area, I feel that he is writing more about the characters and not the place.
ReplyDeleteI also found it difficult to relate with the characters, despite the fact that I knew where a lot of the novel was set. Sure, I live in Edmonton, but I live on the third floor of the Newton Place apartment building right on campus and don't know any of my neighbors. I am not pregnant, nor do I write poetry, and I'd like to hope that none of my professors are psychopaths, or have a crush on me and smell my neck and hair at the Varscona. While I have no doubt that people along these lines exist, they don't exist in my world. The one character that I could relate to a little was Jonas, who I thought was slightly hilarious. But even so, there were certain aspects of his character I found unbelievable. Maybe everyone has one character or place they can relate to a little, but maybe Babiak didn't want to make the characters or place TOO relateable.
ReplyDeleteI do actually think that the characters on Garneau Block are relatable in the sense that I could very easily believe a block like this exists, even though I myself had not quite experienced anything like it. I have somewhat mixed emotional attachments to the people and places. Even though I am not native to this area I have actually been to many of the places Babiuk has used- Commerce Place downtown, the Arts Building, the Sugar Bowl, Starbucks on Whyte Ave, etc. I think as Deborah suggested in class, that we must train ourselves to read in different ways- on the one level we may allow ourselves to feel a particular fondness to the spaces or characters, and on another level we must separate ourselves from these emotional responses in order to exam the novel more critically. One thing my group and I discussed yesterday though was that since places were so vividly described and we had been to most of those places, we were particularly off-put if his descriptions did not match up to our own memories. This in a sense does challenge our connection to the novel. If we remember names, locations, or details of places to be slightly different we might question Babiuk's representations. I do not feel however that these "memory discrepancies" were prominent in the novel. The few times that it happened it merely made me scrunch my nose a little.
ReplyDeleteI think the characters were completely relatable. I even pictured actual people I know as characters of the book because the descriptions matched them so well. The characters are "universal" to people in Edmonton because of the details. I hope this makes sense to you, because it's not quite coming out as I'm meaning it to.
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