I intend to more fully explain this new character, a strange little man who may not be a ghost who Lauren has found in an upstairs bedroom. But I do want to read a bit further first.
But this seemed important to me to write down for my own purposes. That the touch of the odd, the surreal and out of place that I’m finding in this novel as well as obviously in 100 Years of Solitude, has become a key unlocking a door in my writing mind that prissily has resisted the unreal in fiction. Odd, because my early writings were mostly unrealities, horror stories, those that I liked to read–I wrote. Whether life itself or age turned me against the allowance of dream within the structure of life and story, or whether it was just a predilection for truth, somewhere I became insistent upon purity of fiction in its possibilities. How silly. While I still enjoyed reading mysteries, I came to prefer the non-fictional stories based on real-life cases. Slowly I transitioned away from freedom of mind to restrictions that became almost gestapoesque in its policing of what could be and what couldn’t. The vulture of verisimilitude was hovering over my head in all that I wrote.
But with this book following Marquez and beginning perhaps with Paz’s short story, The Wave, I am beginning to let down my hair, get excited about fiction that includes fiction, that allows freedom of creating a world that does not need to be real. And maybe it’s not just that these serve as inspiration and validation, but the timing–the space of time and events of here and now and the stories I read within that space–is just right.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology