Anodyne
Sunday, July 25, 2004
 

Stayed up all night with this, ex-Vancouver Review editor Bruce Serafin's first book.  Serafin writes better than 99% of his local contemporaries, and I really admire his clear-eyed, lucid prose.  The book's structure confounds me -- lurching and jerking around like a plane in turbulence -- but I made it all the way through in one go, nodding at the accuracy of the reported dialogues and his dead-on and utterly unsentimental analysis of West Coast academic and class politics.

"How powerful social structures can be.  The professor smiles; I sit before her with my back bent, my head lowered, a man in his forties unable to make the quip that would ease the emotions her words provoked.  Those emotions resulted (I realize now) from the class structure that ordered the room; more exactly, they were due to the experience of being put in your place, the quintessential colonial experience, which I had reacted to the way people have always reacted to such experiences, unable to salve the wound and unable to wound back."Posted by Hello

- posted by cjb @ 12:21 PM


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