Even though I've been quiet in the blogosphere of late, you better believe I have still been reading. It got a little dicey there for a while, especially when Victor Hugo decided to devote over a 100 pages to describing a battlefield in his Les Mis--that's right folks, not the battle, just the field on which that battle took place. I will admit that I actually considered the potential benefits of abridging a novel (or heck, just turning it into a snappy musical) but I'm happy to say I survived.
In rather stark contrast to that two-month struggle with French Romanticism, I raced through two incredible contemporary novels this past February: The Round House, by Louise Erdrich, and A Hologram for the King, by NovelTease favorite Dave Eggers. The stories are completely different: the first is a coming-of-age tale spurred by one horrific event; the second focuses on a middle-aged man's desperate attempt to do something great in an utterly unpredictable world. Though actual oceans separate these two novels, I was struck by one startling similarity--these are both books that kind of just end. Not neat and tidy, not with a big bow, and certainly not with "...and they lived happily ever after."
I don't want to ruin these stories for you, so I'll keep my comments general here. Let me just say that in both of these cases, the ambiguous ending really worked. Sometimes when a story ends this way, I find myself frustrated, asking: BUT WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?!? Will he/she/it/they be okay/happy/in love forever? Thankfully, I didn't have any of these worries here...I felt satisfied, really. Not satisfied in a simple 'everything will everything work out for my new imaginary friends' way, but in a deeper, truer way--the way that says, yes, this is how the book should end, because I have enough information now to imagine where the story will go from here. In this way, the author invites us to take over the storytelling process, which I really love.
