It's been a good week...

Don't know whether it's the cooler weather or all the arts events I attended, but I feel more like writing.

First though, I've been reading Mary Gordon's Pearl, a novel concerning a young American woman studying in Dublin who goes on a hunger strike in support of a casualty (at least in her view) of the troubles. What is particularly interesting to me is the voicing of the work. If I am not mistaken, it is written in the first person, the author's voice, which was at first difficult to read. For example, at the beginning of the second section, she writes:

This is who and what Pearl Meyers believes she is, what and what she is to herself. But what is she to us? A twenty-year-old woman. A woman who is starving, a woman chained to a flagpole in front of the American embassy in Dublin, Ireland.  A woman who is lying on the ground.

But who am I? you may be asking.

Think of me this way: midwife, present at the birth.  Or perhaps this: godfather, present at the christening. Although of the three people with whom we are concerned, perhaps the most important, Pearl herself, was never christened. If not the christening, them, perhaps the naming. Present at the naming. A the speaking of the most important word.

I am about two thirds of the way through this work and it's a little slow going, but (I think) an important read.