He moved to North Carolina after graduating high school and became a college student and photographer.
The description of Beth’s illness is repellant: cancer is not about “white do-rag wrapped with exquisite carelessness around…hairless heads” and descents into beautiful though ghostly kingdoms, but very real suffering.Michael Cunningham was born in Landover, Maryland and fell in love with photography at the age of twelve.
Characters exist in some rarefied, high-Modernist atmosphere, sit in bathtubs while an all-important Woolfian window stands open (to glacial weather), discussing their dreams “as if they scientists, taking notes”, spend all night taking drugs then emerge onto rooftops in snowstorms to ponder moments when they “were able to hold very being in…outstretched hands and say, here I am…”, supposedly have money worries but sit around writing songs,”‘stand for a moment in…doorway rectangle of snowy light…appear to wonder, briefly, at the fact that there at all”. Then there were just too many interchanges that didn’t ring true: Tyler’s rage that Barrett did not tell him about the light, Barrett’s desire to keep it secret, the just plain weird childhood interactions with their mother. Then I found the characterization, though possibly sophisticated, too convoluted: both Barrett, Tyler and Beth, at various times, wish Beth was well, ill, dead and alive. Initially the main disappointment was that I wanted the book to be about Barrett, who is introduced to us at the opening, but soon takes a back seat to Tyler. The overall parallel to Andersen’s fable is muddy however, single elements endowed with both malevolent and benevolent significance, characters taking the role of child rescuer, child captive and Snow Queen simultaneously.
It is unusual for a contemporary novel to align itself so overtly with a fairytale but Cunningham’s novel does, the references to frozen lakes, sleepers, underworlds, journeys, captivity, ‘cinder’s caught in people’s eyes, and snow (characters dream, write songs about, walk in, liken drugs and memories to snow) intruding obsessively. Beth recovers from cancer – the Snow Queen’s kingdom – miraculously, only to succumb three months later and die. His brother Tyler, with whom he has an unusually close relationship, is trying to write a song to save his dying girlfriend Beth. The Snow Queen begins with the promise of greatness and the exciting prospect, in our current climate, of spiritual phenomena being explored seriously: “A celestial light appeared to Barrett Meeks in the sky over Central Park, four days after Barrett had been mauled, once again, by love.” It is modern-day Brooklyn.
0 kommentar(er)
