re:mote voices

Title: Amaryllis Day And Night
Author: Russell Hoban
Publisher: Bloomsbury

-after reading an extract of her name was lola, the forthcoming novel by russel hoban, i became interested in his work. from some basic research it seemed that amaryliss day and night was probably a good starting place for the sort of thing i was after from his work. so i picked it up and bumped it to the top of my reading list, partly because the interest was fresh, and partly because at under 200 pages this is not a book that is going to take a long time to read.

-peter diggs is an artist, who teaches a couple of days a week at a london college. the book starts with his first dream of amaryliss, a woman who dreams every night of a threatening bus ride. amaryliss has pulled him into the dream in the hope that he will be a suitable companion. at least this is what she explains to him when she turns up in his life for real. the relationship between the two grows, but there are differences between that in the shared dreams and reality.

- hoban plays with the relationship and with reality. the experiences of each coming in to play, which shapes their relationship as much as does their dreams. even in reality hoban plays with the imagery, so there is a sense of the fantastic, of explicit and beguiling suggestion. spinning the reader around like the pathways of the klein bottles described as we switch back and forth, the characters stepping from dream to reality and back, in a way that almost makes sense, though also disorientates.

-the sense of how hoban deals with reality reminds of murakami's approach to writing, entering dream spaces and distinctive weirdness. the undercurrent of the absurd and the tongue in cheek humour that bubbles under that in turn is reminiscent of my experience with brautigan. though at 78, hoban has a great number of books behind him and has certainly established his own fictional space.

-the cover to the version i have keeps in step with the design of several of the other designs of hobans recent prints. it is split in two. the top half showing a light house which appears through the course of the book. while the lower shows a flower, which i presume is an amaryliss, a member of the nightshade family.

-i suspect hoban is someone that you need to be in the right mood for. unfortunately i think i rushed this reading, and as a result speant too much time stealing the time to read paragraphs here and there. so that in the end i didn't get the feeling that i appreciated it as much as i expected. i was conscious of the ideas coming across, and my potential enthusiasm for those. but somehow, this time it didn't entirely click. so i think i will need to re-read the book before i can really say i enjoyed it. though that doesn't stop the fact that i did get something from it and still feel the urge to read more.