4/17 - Last September 'n' things

i'm not sure what it is - the characters, the setting, the plot (if there is one) - but for whatever reason I just find it extremely difficult to follow what's happening in this darned book. Now, obviously with me being a lone, insignificant college student in the Midwest, this doesn't mean that there isn't anything happening or that the material is inferior in any way, it just means that for whatever reason, I can't wrap my head around it. That being said, I think the further I get into the novel, the more I can somewhat-kinda-sorta soak up what's all the intricate (and I use the term "intricate" lightly) plot movement.

While discussing what modernism is, I thought about the ideas that everyone had and I began to understand and believe that this book is indeed modernist. First, the shifting points of view - every chapter seems to begin to focus on another character, but within that chapter itself, the focus goes from one character to the next, and then sometimes back again. In one section, I believe I was reading a bit about Marda, but then all of a sudden it shifts perspectives from her (though it may not have been her) to "Laurence could not sleep" or something to that effect. While I understand that this is a modernist quality, I do not know if it's used to its greatest effectiveness. I mean, the way it is now, with the sudden shift, it seems like Bowen wanted the reader to be confused and shaken by the immediate change. But, that may not have been her purpose - perhaps she did not know of any other way to change viewpoints.

Not following any clear plot structure/having a plot that is not traditional is definitely a modernist quality that this and other books we have read have shared. Orlando definitely didn't follow an understandable plot (but the book itself was somewhat easy to follow, it just wasn't traditional) - I definitely couldn't predict the ending to the story of the 300 year-old sex-changed...person. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man also had a wonky plot. It didn't really seem to know where it was going to go - one moment we're in Stephen's childhood and then just a bit later we're with him at college.

Actually, the more I think about it, I don't think that what I'm talking about is related to the plot structure, it's more about the subject of time within the novel. Shifting through different moments in time without warning was definitely a quality of the majority of novels we've previously read. Orlando, as I mentioned, was jumping all over the timeline of his/her life, but once you got over the fact that times have changed, it was reasonably easy to follow what was happening.

Some of the books we've read dealt in ever-changing times, and Bowen's book is no different, though it's a bit tamer when compared to works like Orlando. While we have a general sense of where and when things are happening, the reader isn't too sure how much time has passed within the story - characters talk about how someone has stayed for "too short a time" but never actually mention how long they were there,

I guess the point is that if you dwell on the fact that time isn't really mentioned it might be confusing, but if you accept that time is irrelevant in the whole scheme of things, then The Last September can go much smoother.