Subject: Re: High school novels: John Knowles "A Separate Peace"
From: The Laughing Man (the_laughing_man@hotmail.com)
Date: Tue Jan 18 2000 - 10:15:28 EST
John Knowles "A Separate Peace"
Did the bi-yearly task the other day of compressing the books in my various
shelves (a celebration was due and I needed clean surfaces).
Since my bookshelves are all full, and I hate having to go to the attic to
get anything, I stack piles of books, magazines, and
soon-to-be-important-novel notes on any stackable entity in my home except
for the floor (a humble, last appreciation of my pedantic upbringing). In
the process of cleaning those surfaces, adding yet another layer of books in
the shelves, I came by my copy of John Knowles "A Separate Peace", hidden
away in one of the innermost layers.
I hardly remember anything about the novel, apart from a glowing
remembrance, more like a feeling, of a portrait of a friend told with very
much love. Somewhere inside me I have made a mental note saying this was not
a very good book, but the warm feeling after finding it tells me I did kind
of liked it. It is not only - but that, too - the memory of the girl giving
it to me I like.
Aah, those fragments. That mixing of memory and desire. A tree by a lake,
two boys climbing it, one falling. A terrible decease. Someone running away
from the prep school. And something about the narrators friend... a gift or
was it a curse... of processing something said to him while answering it.
You could, the narrator says (according to my memory), se how the light
suddenly turned on in the middle of an answer, when his inner narrator
finally reached an important passage told to him minutes ago. A slowness I
could relate to, in me an others. Those fragments passed by when I once
again buried the book deep down in my representation of history, the
different layers in my bookshelves.
Anyway, it is a coming-of-age novel, just the kind of novel maybe a few of
us bfishers would have a recollection of. Anyone have a say on this book? It
is not a high school novel of the 1990's, as was asked for, but it IS one of
those coming-of-age novels of the privileged class we like so much (the
books, not necessarily the class).
/TLM
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