@dlowan,
Quote:But..one presumes you know somrthing about the new one?
That is a reasonable presumption for one to make, Deb!
Especially since I have now read 130 (of the 800+ pages) of
this is all The Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn. It is about about adolescence, for adolescents, according to the reviews. (Though the back cover includes the statement:
"Not suitable for young readers".Go figure ...)
It is written from the point of view of 19 year old Cordelia, for her as yet unborn daughter. She's a passionate writer & chooses the old Japanese
pillow book as her mode of communication. Basically it is the story of her teenage years. (Written by a 70 year old male author!)
Anyway, whether the target audience for this book is teenagers or not, I'm finding it a very interesting read, so far. But then, I've spent most of my adult life working with adolescents & find this a fascinating stage of development, so this could well explain my interest.
This might tell you more than I can at this early stage:
Quote:.... (the)first-person narrator, is 19 and pregnant. Because her vocation is poetry and writing is necessary to her life, she compiles what she intends to share with her unborn daughter when the child is 16: the narrative of her own life from just before her 16th birthday to the present, interspersed with the 'pillow book' she has assembled in these years. A 'pillow book', on a Japanese model, is defined here by Ivan Morris as a 'notebook or collection of notebooks...in which the author would from time to time record impressions, daily events, poems, letters, stories, ideas, descriptions of people, etc'. The narrative thread is thus accompanied by abundant deviations, digressions, interruptions, pauses, during which we gather insights into the hidden, true, complex Cordelia, in whose house of self are many rooms. What Cordelia the young writer intends as a way of being contemporary with her child is also in practice a kind of teaching and initiation. This story shall the woman teach her daughter. Cordelia loves her Shakespeare, and allusions to him are recurrent and plentiful: the novel is about many things besides Cordelia, one of them that a life lives on in language and writing and is recoverable. Which, as things turn out, is just as well.
The book is immense, in size, ambition, scope and reach. The torment, joy and intensity of sexual learning can rarely have been caught so vividly. Here is not only Cordelia's sexual, emotional and mental history in these years, recorded in intimate, self-interrogating detail, but also the life behind the life, where language quarries deeply to bring private order out of turbulence. This is 'all' of Cordelia, and only a vast book can contain it.
http://www.aidanchambers.co.uk/books/thisisall.htm
