What I found to be the most interesting aspect of The Pink Institution, was the structure of the book itself. Each chapter serves as a small vignette that tells a mini story that in some way connects to the overall story of the book. In this way the book is a sort of puzzle: the reader must put the vignette stories together to figure out the overriding message of the book.
The author, Selah Saterstrom, also experiments with how the vignettes are written. There few are poems early in the book, then the next few vignettes are all dry short stories. The final few vignettes are more detailed short stories.
For my Avant guard piece I decided to rework my story about Biff and Cam so that the style of this piece is more similar to The Pink Institution’s. Okay so for the first paragraph I tried to mold the style after one of the more dry short stories from the TPI. To do this I shortened the sentences, and gave very simple explanations for the characters feelings. I wasn’t exactly sure why this was done in The Pink Institution, but using this style in my own story I can see that it is perhaps used so that the reader is allowed to draw their own conclusions about the characters feelings.
After the first paragraph I tried to mold the second half of the piece after one of the poems from TPI. The poetry from The Pink Institution is more of a visual type so I followed a similar style. I separated the word “I” from the rest of the sentence, to symbolize how alone the main character feels. I also used ‘space out parenthesis’ (example: ( )) before the name of the character Cam, to symbolize the weird brotherly love relationship Biff has with Cam. (parenthesis symbolizing love [two parts of a whole])
VERY interesting. Thanks for this full response to TPI.
ReplyDeleteWhole books could be written on recent literature and the use of parenthesis. Glad you are thinking about this instrument of inclusion-exclusion, emphasis-minimization.