Circadian Shift

A literary bent on the week's board...

I bought the novel Eleanor Rigby by Douglas Coupland a few weeks back, and I think I've finally finished it. It's hard to say for sure, because -- like with most of his books that I've read -- I did it by paging forward to find the "good" bits and then backtracking to see what I missed, such that the whole experience of the plot wound up being tangential and episodic. I suspect that if I had read the book "properly" from beginning to end, the net effect would have been much the same.

The typical Coupland-esque themes centering around the displacement of time, place, and self abounded. The book's protagonist, Liz Dunn, struck me as being an anti-Bridget Jones, which made her seem all the more real. I was pleasantly surprised to find the closest thing to a "happy ending" that I've seen in any of Coupland's books. Of course, he never goes for the pat conclusion; there's always a lingering element of uncertainty, but at least there's hope and some measure of redemption. So, on the whole, I actually liked the book.

You can read the first ten pages of Eleanor Rigby here (PDF, 83.5 kb).

Anyway, so the featured image on this week's board is taken from the cover of Eleanor Rigby (North American hardcover edition). The text is from the poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" by Robert Frost. And, as the two together would imply, I've been having trouble sleeping again. Quelle surprise.