The Politics of Art & Authenticity

When someone reads something they tend to interpret it their own way.  The reader personalizes the experience by reading the piece in a certain tone.  I tend to enjoy reading something myself rather than being read to.  It is never intentional but when people read to me two things tend to happen.  I become bored, become drowsy, and fall asleep.  That or my mind begins to wander and I question what I’m being read.  These questions lead to more questions and even more questions, which I attempt to answer, and in the act of trying to answer I completely forget that I’m being read to and miss vital pieces of information in the story.

I hate to say it but at one point during Katherine Vaz’s reading this happened to me.  I did not quite expect her voice to be as it was.  It did not catch my attention and was somewhat monotonous in my opinion.  Her voice didn’t change but it rose when she was reading something she was excited about.  In other words, the reading seemed dry.  She droned on and on and at one point her reading became background sound to my own thoughts on her book.

I think I would buy her new book if I ever came across it in a bookstore.  Despite being long it seemed to have an interesting story line and plot.  I also believe that if I read this work then I would put my own tone to it, which would make it more interesting to me.  Also if I read it some of the more confusing pieces which had been read might become clearer to me.  I’m sure there are some words I misheard and didn’t hear at all.  There were also strange but interesting pieces like eating song.  I had never heard of such a thing before.  I am glad Katherine explained where she coined the term and what it meant.  If she hadn’t, I’m sure I would have been lost through most of the reading.

She tends to add a lot of detail, which I enjoy.  These details make Vaz stand out as an author.  For example, she writes in the Lisbon Story, “The carpeting was cornflower tint, and geodes caught sunrays on a mantel that had been barnacled with them since my childhood.” After reading the story, I found that this was one of the lines that stood out most to me.  Her heavily detailed writing paints vivid pictures in anyone’s mind for all parts.

All in all I feel that Katherine Vaz is a very good writer. Her writing is very entertaining with pieces of her own personality speckled across each piece.  During the reading I thought that there were sentences that seemed like they were run-ons due to the amount of details crammed into them.  If her book was written anything like Lisbon Story then I think I was wrong in assuming that, that it was her pauses, attempting to set the tone, that made the sentences longer than they really were.

source:

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