National Children's Book Day and Conrad

yesterday, Nikki instant messaged me a note letting me know it was National Children's Book Day. i thought about announcing that here, but didn't really feel like posting anything at the time, so i just shrugged and went about my business.

now i feel vaguely guilty about it. i am, after all, a firm believer that all-kids-should-be-encouraged-to-read-even-if-
they-happened-to-be-blind-deaf-and-dumb who used to collect kids books that look and sound fun to read out loud (for reasons i will not elaborate on here) and even have my own kids' book(s) in the works.

so, yes, this is a post trying to make it up to the Lords of Literary Kharma.

hope you all spent the day accordingly.


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last night, Mikey's comment about wanting to be compared to Joseph Conrad popped back into my head, for reasons i will never know. the thought triggered the following series of events:

(slow dolt that i am, it only then dawned on me who the Conrad in Atha must have been named after. but i digress.)

i remembered that i've had a penguin classics edition of Lord Jim for sometime now that i've never read, so i went over to my library and pulled it off the shelf.

i read the about the author section. in the first few lines, Conrad was described as a modernist. this piqued my curiosity further as just last week, in my birthday tribute to The Man, i'd learned that my favorite author, Mervyn Peake, was himself labeled a modernist.

i proceeded to read Conrad's introduction and the first few pages of the first chapter of Lord Jim.

i was then pleasantly surprised to recognize the rhythms, cadences, flow and narrative tone of Atha in those pages.

Atha, stylistically, follows the same beat of Conrad's writing in the opening pages of Lord Jim. the "told-by-the-fire" tone is also similar, and both Mikey and Joseph Conrad display the same sort of wonderful comfort with the narrative voice, allowing it to flow with a smoothness i've rarely encountered anywhere else, graceful to the ear and the tongue both, without giving-up a whit of its incisiveness.

all this is not to say that Mikey's writing is an imitation of Conrad (though that wouldn't be all that bad, given that she's told her own story, after all); Mikey's writing seems to have an additional hallucinatory tinge, some modern 21st century grit, and the substance of the narrative itself seems to be more visually-inclined than Conrad's already visually-oriented tale.

these are all very good things, imho.

so there you go, Mikey. possibly your first public comparison to Conrad.


good grief. this blog is turning into a regular fanboy page for Ms Atienza.