Lately I've been reading bits and pieces of philosophy and poetry; since I've been stuck in bed and it's what's next to my bed, I dip into it. So in addition to trashy novels and SF I will pick up Ways of the Hand or The Straight Mind or Anatomy of Melancholy and read a random section to set my mind adrift & be stimulated. It unanchors me from going round & round with worries.
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter sucked me right in with the interspersed odd melodramas of the scriptwriter, though I nearly choked and had to put the book down a bit on the super racist one about the "savage" or madman. The characters from the different radio soap operas and their qualities or backgrounds mix with each other - and now towards the end they start to mix up even within one story, so that in the story about the priest in the slums, Mayte Unzategui shows up about 5 times but as different people! As the stories started to intermix and became confused I got more and more excited and if I were Vargas Llosa I would start making the unreliable characters bleed into the callow youth's short stories. I wondered extremely who the Mexican writer/poet/economist with the epileptic wife is (because surely that detail is real!) Anyway it's fun - Thanks Iris! - and I have the spanish as well at hand.
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