Have you ever stopped to consider where your thoughts come from, or at least how one thought leads to another until you have an unbroken chain that's taken you from an A to a Zed that have nothing in common with each other? That thing called a brain that's stuck up between our ears can do the most amazing things without us even noticing. One minute you could be talking about what you'd like for lunch, the next planning your own funeral.
In the early part of the twentieth century, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf began experimenting with a style of writing called stream of consciousness in attempts to chart the workings of the thought process. Since then, quite a few writers have followed in their footprints with varying degrees of success. Trying to recreate the continual flood of information that most of us process from second to second without it becoming an exercise in tedium is a difficult and painstaking process.
Ideally, the author will utilize stream of consciousness at points throughout a novel as a means of letting a character justify his or her behaviour, and to give the reader deeper insight into him or her. Of course, if as the reader we don't give a damn about the character it was all just wasted ink and paper.
Stepping into someone else's thoughts can generate a slew of feelings in a reader. But I must say that David Thewlis' novel The Late Hector Kipling is the first that's made me feel like I was rubber necking at a car accident, trying to spot the corpse as I drove by slowly. Published in Canada by Penguin Canada, this brilliant piece of satire about the world of contemporary visual art and artists charts the collapse of Hector Kipling's life from successful artist with loving girlfriend to nut-job.
Article comments
1 - Gordon Hauptfleisch
I think you sold me on the book--thanks, Richard.
2 - Natalie Bennett
This article has been selected for syndication to Advance.net , which is affiliated with newspapers around the United States, and to Boston.com. Nice work!