Words

While I was in Taiwan these last two months I was reading, when I was reading which wasn't that often actually, Faulkner's Absalom! Absalom!; a hell of an interesting book by a truly great writer. I'd tried to read Faulkner before (The Sound and the Fury), but it was too much for me at the time; I was too young and inexperienced a reader. He's a writer who you have to work at to read; fight with almost at least at first until you begin to grasp the poetics of his language that once suitably immersed come to possess you with its intensity of expression. I'm still not finished, but I decided that I could use a break from it and that for this short trip to Thailand I should bring something else along so that I wouldn't run out while I was here. Spadework by Timothy Findley was the book thus chosen to accompany me; one I'd been curious about having read others by him (The Wars and Not Wanted On the Voyage) and having it sit in front of me on the coffee table where I've been living these last two months. My roommate Caitlin had got it from an ex-Canadian boyfriend but had yet to read it so I thought I'd give it a try.

Interesting it was. Set entirely in Stratford, Ontario of all places. Not exactly a difficult read anyways; I finished it in all of two days. An All's Well That Ends Well kind of book taking place as it does among the theatre gliterrati of Stratford's annual Shakespeare Festival. Happy family with underlying conflicts, crisis brought on by same conflicts, eventual resolution - hardly original plot structuring. But of course, what novels these days are in anyway original. Not too many. Instead, the characters are what's important and in this book, as in the others I've read by him, Findley does a pretty good job of telling us their story and thereby convincing us of their reality. Certainly not a great book, but rather a pretty good one.

One thing that bothered me about this book in which nearly every character smoked cigarettes at least a little, if not a lot, was his consistent usage of "lighted" as in "She lighted a cigarette as...". I know it's grammatically correct, but it sounds so stilted and awkward compared to the equally sensical and much more flowing "lit"; "she lit a cigarette..." sounds so much better don't you think?

And while on the topic of word usage, when did the indefinite article "an" become usable in front of words that don't start with vowels? Having finished Spadework I went out last night to find something new to read and at one of the many used bookstores scattered around Khao Sarn Rd. found The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History by Phillip Bobbitt. A very good read so far, but he consistently writes (not a quote since I don't have the book with me, but a similar example): "It happened in terms of an historical event not previously seen..." Huh? Since when has this been deemed grammatically correct? As I've been trying to teach my students in Taiwan, one of the vagaries of the English language is the different usages of the indefinite articles: "a" in front of words that begin with a consonant, and "an" in front of any word that begins with a vowel (a,e,i,o,u). Yet a Professor of Constitutionl Studies at a major American university with a PhD from Oxford apparently thinks differently and somehow managed to get his editors and publisher to go along with him. Can anyone explain this one?