Posts by Jolisa
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I'm guessing he has this on the wall of his writing studio.
Wicked! Actual purple spheres!
Which, as a correspondent of mine pointed out, are originally Tennyson's. (I'd attribute this connection, but they wish to remain anonymous).
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Has someone perhaps missed the figurative meaning of 'purple prose'?
Or embraced it, and gone right over the top with it. Reading the book was like being at a Prince concert, only a little bit less sexy.
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I confess, I did crack up at the line "It is 1917, and World War I continues to alarm us." Also, the two moments in which the kiwi is glossed as "the native bird of my homeland." (Just in case you thought it was a Chinese gooseberry or something).
And there were quite a few moments along these lines (p235):
Ahead was a jewel sparkling in a sea of indescribable beauty; dark purple, pink, streaked with layers of gold and deepening to vermilion. Just below the surface was a layer of pink jellyfish, like a bed of aquatic flowers strewn across our pathway. Then, leaping, spraying high, came a school of great giant whales to create an avenue of arching rainbows.
And p295:
The sea... filled with dark purple spheres like many crystal glasses spilling their rich wine into the currents. Swelling to the brim, it stilled for a moment. Then the sun, ascending further, transmuted those empurpled swirls into a shimmering pathway of gold and crimson.
NB definitely original. Except that the dark purple spheres/crystal wine glass line is so great that it's used at least twice in the course of the novel, perhaps three times.
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Any belly-laughs in The Trowenna Sea?
Mmm, not really, but a few giggles. Page 91, Hohepa speaking :
...while modesty forbids me from talking too much about my appearance -- after all, a man should not look into a mirror, as does a woman, to seek pleasure in his reflection -- I was told by many a young girl that I was attractive to look upon.
[...]
My contemporaries, who accepted that I was a leader among them but did not want me to get too whakahihi, liked to cut me down to their level by saying, "You may be tall but your ure tangata is no bigger than ours."Well, anybody's ure tangata would be small if he spent as much time in the water as I did! My friends would have been somewhat shattered, though, to realise that it could treble in size when aroused.
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Footnotes can be fun. See Terry Pratchett, for example. (See Terry Pratchett for anything, really, he's great).
You could certainly do footnotes,and it could be all terribly postmodern and interesting, and you could go further and use different fonts and insert photographs and original documents, to draw attention to the heteroglossia of history, etc etc... You could, but you'd still have to hang it on a well-written and well-told story, I think. Even more so, because you'd be presuming on the reader's patience and attention to a more consequential degree than with a straightforward narrative.
It could work, but it would look very very different from The Trowenna Sea, which is, in the end, a fairly conventional historical novel with plagiarised chunks masquerading as the author's own work. It's not cutting-edge in any sense, just cut-and-paste, which is a different thing altogether.
Another possible approach: one could just sit down and write one's own novel. Other novelists do it all the time, or so I gather.
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Shiver me timbers, matey! It's curious coincidence time:
Ihimaera borrows a paragraph from the Cornish missionary William Colenso for his Treaty of Waitangi scene.
William Colenso had (at least) two sons, one by his wife Elizabeth, another by her Maori maid, Ripeka. The white son, Ridley, went to Cambridge, then moved to Scotland.
While the other son, Wiremu moved to Cornwall, and lived the rest of his life in.....yes, Penzance.
Truth, as so often, not just stranger but stronger than fiction.
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And a good.. job... too!!!!
Nice one, Spike. (Instant flashback for music geeks, but for anyone struggling to recall the tune, it's here).
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I think we should make [Veronelli] the patron of the book club.
Pierre Menard as secretary, of course.
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See? Cometh the hour, cometh the man.
I knew we could rely on you, Giovanni.
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Great set of questions from BookieMonster.