Posts
The book is made up entirely of letters, with each writer
carrying his or her own voice with flavorful precision. After a while, you
don’t even need to look at the signature to know who the letter is from. Reading
the first few pages, as a writer I was skeptical, thinking—there is no way
anyone can string together an entire novel solely of letters and still let
readers see any action, without it sounding forced. How could you sneak in those
little details and quirks about a person, or show them in action, without
reminding the reader they are basically only reading a second-hand account of
what happened, one person repeating something they saw.
Well, what else does an author do, if not that?
I guess I thought it would be difficult to describe how
somebody else said something. You know, to mention that every time they said
this or that, they had a little twinkle in the eyes? But mainly, I feared a
reader might suspect author intrusion too many times.
But not once did I ever feel the author intruded on any of
these characters’ original voices, thoughts, or manner of speaking. And just as
praises had said, I literally forgot I was reading fictional letters, because I
got so lost and caught up in each character’s life, the gossip spread about,
that I forgot this was a novel, entirely made up. Perhaps the wealth of
historical tidbits thrown in helped make this world real to me.
Forgetting that I’m only reading does not happen to me
often, because usually when I study as I go along. I try to analyze why authors
make one choice over another, how they structure their sentences, create
tension, describe telling details. It was impossible to do this after the first
few pages into THE GUERNSEY LITERARY AND POTATO PEEL PIE SOCIETY, because I was
no longer reading. I was experiencing.I could never expect more from a book than that.
