The Book of Color Book

When I read, I try to know as little as possible when I start. This is a good example of how that is a good practice to have: the interpretation on the back of the book is so concrete and narrow, that had I read it before beginning, it would have skewed everything so strongly, it'd have been a very different experience. In other words, what was a very atmospheric read--with multiple interpretations all the way til the end--would have been pegged into a very strict post-colonial reading. And in so doing, the Murakami-esque openness of it would have been lost. The glowing vibrancy of the symbolism, where ''each event, character and object shimmers with talismanic power'' (NYTIMES reviewer) would have been reduced to a stilted and pre-charted course had I read the back of the book before beginning. The reason to read the book in the first place would have been lost had I been psychologically primed to see X, when the book is about more than X.

Luckily I didn't/wasn't, and while I was glad to read that well-condensed summary of the themes on the back after getting the experience with fresh eyes by myself, I'm sorry to see when such well-meaning editors ruin the experience for other people. Though sometimes even the blurbs from critics reveal too much as well.

Content-wise...? Coming just a week or two after finishing Infinite Jest for the second time, this was a breath of fresh air. In many ways its the exact opposite of that book, here poetical mood in place of precision and narrative discipline. Not to mention concision and (here) lots of one-time allusions that are not part of some giant code that is heavily thought-out: here, more of a dream-like quality, especially considering that all of the main characters are presented mostly through their eyes as children, or viewed as adults through the eyes of a child. For this reason, a lot of the bigger cultural statements come delayed, as you begin to process them. It's because the children don't have the vocabulary or the observational skills to draw much sense out of what they witness (though we do, supposedly). That the back of the book talks about ''the ensuing destruction'' is not something I felt was present, but maybe because the kids here are not themselves able to discern any kind of decline sustained over a long period of time.

Pretty interesting, this is another -le-mot-juste -type writer that reads more like tone poems than a narrative, especially considering that the chapters are 2 or 3 pages on average, often without a lot of overlap in terms of content (though the second half is able to make good use of repetition built on the motifs in part one, even without any formal sense of closure). Well, another super-short read that I packed for my travels, but one that will continue to resonate with me for some time.