raino

I read Kim Sanley Robinson's Red Mars, well actually still a few pages remain, but it really got me thinking about characters in literature. With literary fiction of the character-driven sort, I'm often left unsatisfied and baffled, it's like there is no point to the whole thing, and the characters don't really model in my mind as personalities. But with Robinson's Mars, the people really feel like people, I almost feel like I now know Ann and Frank and Nadia and John, I could predict what they might do in a given situation, I could almost ask them for advice! And yet, according to Goodreads, many people have found the characters cardboard-y, one-trait stereotypes etc. I really thought about what's it with the Mars characters that makes me 'get' them. And I think it's that the book is focused on the interaction between humans and environment, both changing and both getting changed. This relationship with the external world, and that the characters have views on how they should or should not affect the world makes them real people in my mind.

So many lit fiction characters are endlessly ruminating their feelings, their past, their past feelings, their feelings' pasts... not the world as it is and how it might become, if we take certain actions. Lately one lit fiction non-genre book I really enjoyed was about an architect who designed the Church of Helsinki (a real historical person). It was a small and melancholy book, with a strongly researched early 19th century. Not much happened in it, plot-wise. It was written from the pov of the architect himself, and much of it was about his responsibility as an architect to create buildings fit to last for eternity. He was definitely viewing himself as a small part of a big Universe, aware of times passed and yet to come, and that is the sort of perspective that touches me.

I think there are two kinds of people. One sort models the world beginning from themselves, extrapolating outwards to as far as necessary, but it all begins with their self and internal experiences. And the other sort the world, the universe is primary, and they fit their model of themselves in whatever weirdly shaped spaces there are left after all the mental pieces of the world they have have been assembled.

Now that I just wrote that, it sounds like how I understand many pre-modern peoples have thought, and perhaps that's why I always feel somehow at home reading really old old texts. The concept of individual self is a bit hazy, or not yet developed... but I also like Heian period diaries and they are very modern and self-reflective in that sense.

I don't know where I'm going with this, this whole train of thought is still kinda half-formed and hard to articulate.