In this latter concern, the author is being true to his day job as one of the pre-eminent literary critics of his generation. In this manoeuvre, perhaps, can be discerned Deane's main preoccupation in Reading in the Dark namely, a meditation on the nature not only of how stories are made but also the centrality of the act of reading and interpretation. Amplifying this ambiguity is how Deane chooses to render his story through the conventions of the novel form and not as an autobiography or memoir, despite the story's genesis in reality and lived experience. This uncertainty is central to the story itself with knowledge and knowing being the objects of desire in Deane's novel as his unnamed narrator searches for the truth at the heart of the secret that troublingly haunts his family. It hovers elusively between numerous narrative genres – the ghost story, detective fiction, the Gothic, and Bildungsroman – never finally settling on any single one. (Christina Rossetti)Ĭonfusion is at the heart of Seamus Deane's (1940–) only novel, Reading in the Dark (1996). When you can no more hold me by the hand,
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |