The Night I Dropped Shakespeare on The Cat

John Olson's The Night I Dropped Shakespeare On The Cat is hard to classify, hard to read, and hard to stop thinking about. There are numerous short chapters. There are sparse illustrations by artist Derek White. There are words. Mostly, there are words. Words without context or story, or so it seems. Is it stream of consciousness? Not quite, because throughout the span of the book Olson emphasizes certain ideas and words. Is it poetry? The density of each page says no, but the attention to individual words demands the reader's attention on the same level poetry does. Is it fiction or memoir? There are compelling short spurts of story in which the author seems to be drawing on personal experience, but these are few and far between in a sea of language. While the pages resemble prose, Olson deliberately arranges sentences that make no grammatical sense. Something else is going on here. Olson is interested in words. He is interested in how sounds and images represent ideas and things. By the end of the book Olson is more comfortable being explicit with his relationship to language, but the first moment of epiphany when it becomes evident that he is using the word "jackknife" repeatedly, simply because he likes the word "jackknife" is the moment the book makes sense. Yet Olson repeats words not at random, but spaces them like gems in a bracelet. He uses words that evoke the visual in a lush way: "Water turquoise and green. . . Water streaked with whorls of delinquent oil." Derek White's complicated composite illustrations, sparse at first and progressively denser towards the middle of the book, punctuate the prose. Книга «The Night I Dropped Shakespeare on The Cat» автора John Olson оценена посетителями КнигоГид, и её читательский рейтинг составил 8.00 из 10.
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