I’ve been taken up by story, medium, and intricacy of ideas, but I’ve always reviewed books from a writing perspective, and not really as reviews, but as ahah! notes or sometimes, a notable disappointment in plot or style.
Ersinghaus’ writing is so well tuned, perhaps by his background as a Professor of English and knowledge of writing, but I think that’s just the controlling factor. The voice usually reveals the natural talent and in this novel, it goes from lofty to lovely, but all earthy and real:
(Ham on ones)
Yes, if the universe were uniform, centerless, and symmetrical, then, yes, indeed, we’d all be blind or eyeless, but the expectation of uniformity or the redefinition of uniformity is the key to our survival, the key to distinguishing love from hate, life from death, and other discontinuities, other idioms of boundary. Not all the light of stars travels earthward from a uniform distance; neither is the earth infinitely fleshed and boned.
This is a sample of the random yet orderly thoughts of the main character and it would seem that the author has likely found a channeler in Ham. There indeed is always a part of author in his/her characters, and what freedom to allow these more philosophically scientific ideas to be put out there without interruption! But the choice of words is what makes up a voice, the poet found in the imagery, the musical tone of a sentence well-wrought:
"You see love, or charms, or magic, or God, or simple beauty: that’s how far you can see into the dark sky at night." The air began to grow sweetsmelling in the heat and I felt salt water crawl down my face like the tips of hot wet fingers. But then, how does one resolve cruelty, and is death statuesque?
"Salt water crawl down my face like the tips of hot wet fingers." That’s McCarthyesque for sweat.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology