I just read a novel that has gotten a LOT of buzz--GONE GIRL by Gillian Flynn. Co-workers at TKE have liked it, and I raced through 3/4 of the book, completely gone on it. I was like, you know, a gone girl. Flynn is a truly accomplished writer and a slick plotter. But the last 1/4 of the book was so disturbing in its implications and (even) execution, that I started wishing I could rinse my brain out with mouthwash after I finished it.
Has a novel ever affected you that way? Left you with images you wish you could get rid of?
5 comments:
Plenty. If you read crime fiction or detective fiction, it feels like that's always lurking around the corner. The Black Dahlia comes to mind. The recent Tana French, Broken Harbour, was not gratuitous, but at certain points, it kind of hurt to read it. The closing movement just hurt.
I feel I must chat with you about GG. Your post made me run in search of a review with spoilers, so I could be prepared with foreknowledge in case I decided to read it. Which is crazy, I know.
Murakami, in THE WIND-UP BIRD CHRONICLES has a scene where a Mongol skins a man alive with an agonizing precision that shriveled me.
But I still like reading Murakami. Go figure.
After your e-mail I went back to that last section and it doesn't stand up to a second reading. That a person would willingly put themselves in that kind of a situation defies belief...
Living Dead Girl. I wanted to scream out loud through the entire thing because it was so painful. Not painful to read, the writing was fabulous, but the story made me want to hold every single child in the world so close to me that they could never, ever get hurt like that.
No Country For Old Men, but maybe if I had read the book first, it would not have been the same. Bag of Bones and the Alienist both left images I wanted to get rid of the time. I wonder if re-reading deadens it.
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