My Brain Goes A-Wandering

[forsyth]

So I just read Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town. All in mostly one sitting, I'd started reading some of it over the past few days but sat down and read the rest from when I woke up until like an hour ago. This may not have been the best idea, or maybe it's just because my brain was predisposed to weird places, because my brain has just been in weird places since then, and because of other general things, I think. But the book itself, especially the ending, left me confused. Mostly the ending, really, it reminds me of The Diamond Age in a sense, where the book goes along, building toward something, something big and you can start to see the outline of it and know you're getting close as the pages dwindle away and keep expecting the knots to tie themselves and then things just sort of stop. There's an ending, but things just happen, there's no real tie up, nothing really gets resolved, and nothing gets explained. And the something you knew was coming isn't there. Maybe it is, and you're expected to figure it out, or maybe it's just like life in that things don't get explained and not everything gets resolved, but still. It's fiction, not life, that's part of the attraction of fiction.

But the thing the story's left with me is an even more magnified feeling that the world is strange and complex and I don't understand it in the slightest. Especially the parts with people. There's the shape of something there, too, and again it's something that promises to be there, but just isn't, and though I can feel the outlines of it, I don't understand it. Whole parts of the world I don't understand, and that's something I hate, because I want to understand things. All of them. But I have no idea where to start, some times.

Comments

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

As I recall, Snow Crash also just sort of stopped.

[forsythferret.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it did, but it was a more satisfying stop than Diamond Age. At least most of the main things got wrapped up, even if it could easily have gone on 5000 more words. And Snow Crash was more fun and less Mysterious Meaningful Thing Building.