For every book lover's bookshelf

books:


	• How Fiction Works James Wood Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008 - 288 pages average customer review:based on 3 reviews view larger image
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For every book lover's bookshelf

How Fiction Works belongs on every book lover's bookshelf: to be read at random, straight through, occasionally....however you do it, enjoy the read. Wood pays readers the ultimate compliment by giving us this thought-provoking work.

Just Dazzling

This is a dazzling guide to how the mechanisms of the novel originated and developed. It is an exemplary model of how to correlate style and subject matter. It offers inspiration to the novelist and a refreshed sense that fiction matters to those of us who just enjoy reading novels. The book is filled with fascinating insights. I found Wood's illustration of how Flaubert in French is so much more stylistically brilliant than even his best translators can suggest to be particularly illuminating and valuable. This book will make us all better readers.

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The Magician's Secrets

James Wood conducts a concise but edifying tour behind the curtain of novel making, aimed primarily at the student and interested layperson. He examines the techniques used by the novelist that readers routinely take for granted. By spotlighting and defamiliarizing them, he demonstrates how they have evolved over the centuries, including examples of both good and bad usage.

Topics include free indirect style, the conciousness of characters, reality in fiction, successful use of metaphor and simile, different registers of tone, among others.

One of his most interesting discussions is on characters: how have different writers approached creating characters, including a history of critical responses to those approaches.

This is typical of Wood's modus operandi: take a basic component of novel writing and examine the assumptions we make as readers in order to understand and use what we are reading; what are the conventions writers and readers have evolved, and how did they come into being. Wood's style here is mostly shorn of the metaphors that illuminate his prior collections of criticism; the writing is invariably clear and succinct.

My only disappointment was in his episodic inability to refrain from revealing key plot points (i.e. Anna and the train) that may diminish the pleasure for future readers.

This is the best book I know to make one a more observant and appreciative reader.

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What makes a story a story? What is style? What?s the connection between realism and real life? These are some of the questions James Wood answers in How Fiction Works, the first book-length essay by the preeminent critic of his generation. Ranging widely?from Homer to David Foster Wallace, from What Maisie Knew to Make Way for Ducklings?Wood takes the reader through the basic elements of the art, step by step.

The result is nothing less than a philosophy of the novel?plainspoken, funny, blunt?in the traditions of E. M. Forster?s Aspects of the Novel and Strunk and White?s The Elements of Style. It sums up two decades of insight with wit and concision. It will change the way you read.

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