Imagery to Illuminate
Imagery can sometimes have the collateral effect of providing new information that a reader never knew before. Of course, one should never take a work of fiction on merit alone; do the homework and take a few seconds to use the internet for what it was really designed for: typing words into a search engine to make sure they are factual. Even if no longer true—or never true—the imagery here sounds right and, more importantly, make dramatic sense:
“I met her at the Stockholm airport, the only in the world with wood floors: a pretty, dark oak parquet with carefully matched slat—a low estimate would put it at about ten acres of northern woods…As I stared at her more openly, her gaze slid away from mine and down onto that polished floor. Blurting out the first thing I could think of, I said it was a waste of the woods to use them for flooring in an airport.
About that Search Engine
Another bit of imagery in the book undoes some of what was just discussed. But one need not allow this imagery to become factual. Falling down into the darkness of the rabbit hole is not a given and staying on target is within everyone’s grasp, theoretically at least:
“The internet is a fraud. It promises so much—that it will execute your every command, that it will find you what you’re looking for; execution, fulfillment, reward. But in essence that promise is a kind of bait, because you immediately fall into a trance, into hypnosis. The paths quickly diverge, double and multiply, and you go down them, still chasing an aim that will now get blurry and undergo some transformations. You lose the ground beneath your feet, the place where you started from just gets forgotten, and your aim finally vanishes from sight”
Novel-Writing
What does it take to write a novel? A good idea, sure. Time enough to write, absolutely. But don’t discount the advantages of being resistant to the sinister powers of crazy:
“Anyone who has ever tried to write a novel knows what an arduous task it is, undoubtedly one of the worst ways of occupying oneself. You have to remain within yourself all the time, in solitary confinement. It’s a controlled psychosis, an obsessive paranoia manacled to work, completely lacking in the feather pens and bustles and Venetian masks we would ordinarily associate with it, clothed instead in a butcher’s apron and rubber boots, eviscerating knife in hand.”
Do Criminal Profilers Know About This?
The narrator speaks of a superpower that a huge chunk of the population possesses without them even knowing it, and if they don’t know it, it’s a sure bet that nobody else knows it. Of course, now the cat is out of the bag to anyone who reads the book. That being the case, there are some men out there who better hope that none of that group described herewith who also entertain fantasies of becoming a serial killer get their hands on this information and put two and two together:
“…all you have to do to become invisible is be a woman of a certain age, without any outstanding features: it’s automatic. Not only invisible to men, but also to women, who no longer treat her as competition in anything. It is a new and surprising sensation, how people’s eyes just sort of float right over her face, her cheeks and her nose, not even skimming the surface… she thinks, too, of all the opportunities that this invisibility might afford…For example, if something crazy were to happen, nobody on the scene would even remember her having been there”
