Really, lisa? I keep picking it up and putting it down and picking it up again. I feel an urge to finish it. The changing narrative voice is sort of offputting, and the one thing that remains true is my deep and abiding love for the badassness of Lola. But as a whole? It is so much slower than Drown was.

changing narrative voice is sort of offputting

hmm I was surprised by this (I thought the prologue was going to be the exception) but I am actually really loving it. Have you gotten to

Beli's story? In Santo Domingo?

I really, really love the mash-up of references. It feels very real to me. And I love all the DR history.

It's possible I'm just Full of Love these days, though.

I loved Oscar Wao, and talked about it some here, I do believe. I kept having to put it down, just because I like to read easier things much of the time.

Oh, lisah, I think you used the wrong quickedit up there.

See, I still like Midsummer Night's Dream, but that's because I have a week spot for things concerning the Faerie Court. I keep hoping someday someone will do a production of it where the majority of the story is treated like a horror movie. I think it could be very creepy, if approached properly.

The RSC did a production like this eight or nine years ago that you might have liked. I have to admit that I loathed it because I felt like they lost the whismy and humor of the play that I adore so, but they did make it downright creepy.

Kat, when I met Junot Diaz at the Key West Literary Conference this past January, he talked about why he kept changing the narrative voice and melding Spanish and English and geeky references as a way to imitate the immigrant experience--surrounded by words and people you don't quite understand and feeling like you're missing something all the time--which intrigued me. I bought Drown but haven't read it or Oscar Wao yet, but I'm hopeful they live up to my expectations.

And now I'm thinking about Mark Knopfler's "Romeo and Juliet," its weariness and yearning and nostalgia for that electric too-stupid-to-live time. I can't root for their doom; fuck, I was them. I never even had a boyfriend until I was 19, but I was them anyway. And I hope to God Matilda lives to be them, and lives beyond it, and lives to look back and say, "When we made love, you used to cry. You said I love you like the stars above, love you till I die" and know that it's gone, but remember exactly what it felt like, what it was to live in the eye of that storm. And R&J never get to outgrow it, smarten up, look back and regret and yearn.

Okay, I have to say it -- I love JZ more than almost everything. I adore that song, and this is just beautifully put.

melding Spanish and English and geeky references

This totally doesn't phase me at all. It's what I loved about Drown. It's the literal changing of narrators that throws me or makes things off putting.

lisah is full of LERVE! But yeah, I did read the Beli in Santo Domingo stuff. Or at least Beli with the Gangster. I dunno if they do a chapter of Beli and the Lost Years and I hope not because ouch. But the one that threw me is the guy who falls in love with Lola and when he tells about his time as Oscar's roommate.

I dunno. Jesse might be right. I keep reading other stuff in between and all of that stuff is light years lighter.

I keep hoping someday someone will do a production of it where the majority of the story is treated like a horror movie. I think it could be very creepy, if approached properly.

I saw one like this too. Small theater: the conceit was that the fairies were all ghosts or spirits possessing corpses - undead of some kind anyway. Which as I understand it, Celtic faeries actually were...

And I'm with JZ on two points about R&J: two stupid to live, but if they had lived they might have turned out OK in a few years. And their folly only turned into a tragedy because of the greater folly going on around them. Civil war was a much greater folly than adolescent passion.

The Shakespeare movies that my teachers showed us in school were the Branaugh Hamlet and the Roman Polanski Macbeth. That version of Macbeth is really incredibly gory.

And Lady Macbeth is practically a teenager.