To Digress

I've not faced any of the problems over choice of text regarding my 'usual' reading in the way I mentioned yesterday concerning my poetic diet. The novel Such Is Life, which I'd never heard of before, was happily forced on me by an enthusiast, and, having read the first two chapters and being about a quarter of the way in, I've become an enthusiast myself after a bit of a slow start.

It seems the novel is regarded as something of an Australian classic (first published around 1900) and it's a very odd kind of novel in all sorts of ways - hence, my slow start, as it took some getting used to, and hence my enthusiasm, because I'm drawn to the unconventional. It would take a bit of a while to enumerate its various oddnesses, so I won't try and do that now, but I'll just mention one quality that I love about the book. Tom Collins, its writer - but that's a pen name, so don't be taken in, and it's also the name of the narrator himself - is extraordinarily digressive in true Tristram Shandy style. This sort of thing is frowned on in the English language novel - cf Dr Sam Johnson on the aforementioned Shandy - but it seems to me quite a reasonable technique to adopt in the structuring of a novel. After all, it's difficult to think of anything quite as digressive as life and, if you're trying to capture a sense of lived experience, jumping around all over the place seems a good idea to me. Anyway, I reckon it works in Such Is Life, at least in what I've read so far, and I'm hoping for more in the way of lurches into irrelevance and even less plot, of which there seems to have been not much so far, as I happily read on.