timbre

i'd been meaning to post a bit more on linh dinh's blood and soap. certainly, a book so brilliant deserves much more than a "dinh is a fuckin genius," from me.

timbre, i understand, is a musical term referring to distinct qualities of sounds which otherwise match in volume, etc. but i think of dinh's work as possessing a certain fine timbre, which maybe is another way of noting his precision. but it's not just the precision of his word choices. i suppose if i had blood and soap in front of me i'd be citing passages galore, but since i don't, i'll say this much --

one of my major peeves in a piece of literary work is an author's tendency to overtell. you know, such that something originally intended to be artful becomes dryly expository, even propagandistic. now, everything i've ever read of linh dinh relies on rather the opposite. giving the reader just enough, if even that much at all, in order to piece together some kind of image or narrative, in order to (barely) understand his speakers' and characters' motivations, in order to understand the world which his speakers inhabit. dinh's descriptions (clues) are sparse, and we have to rely on ourselves to hear the things his speakers are not saying. a man kneels on the floor while obsessively watching the every move of his downstairs neighbor, a woman whose name he does not know, to whom he has never spoken, whom he swears he loves. the language is so sparse, it's troubling. why kneeling? kneeling on the floor doing what? hands where? pants zipper down? i was thinking to myself as i was reading this poolside in kauai, maybe i just have a terribly perverse mind, but then i thought, no, it's there, in the words the speaker cannot say. much like in another story, the boy in the vietnamese village who learns a word of power, which we can only read as "!" and "!" is the title of this story. this is an english word, i believe. a curse word, i believe. but how much more powerful and perplexing is "!" than, say, "fuck."

so my previous comparison to italo calvino. i'd started (though never finished) reading invisible cities a while back, and i understand its premise as being the same one city which marco polo describes to kublai khan, from different angles of approach, different positioning within it (spires, gardens, alleys), examining different symbols. it's that rendering by omission thing that i dig.

see, but i'm not going to equate this with any pale attempt at universality. i'll just say i believe it has something to do with not merely respecting, but ultimately relying upon the reader's subjectivity.

and that is my dos centavos for the day.