You open the newspaper or the app and look for the column which appears today. You are surprised it is written in the second person, and wonder if it is a gimmick. Novelists have used the technique, some successfully, others not so. Is it possible to sustain the narrative, make a point while ensuring there is enough energy in it?
The writer must feel the tension, although the tension he communicates to you is different in kind.
You have read somewhere that second person fiction was the most important technical advance in fiction since the introduction of stream of consciousness. You recognise some of the names associated with the style: Jay McInerney, Alice Munroe, Chuck Palahnuik, Italo Calvino. It is a useful device to draw readers directly into the plot.
Calvino is a good starting point (although chronologically speaking it isn’t a starting point at all). If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller is a book about itself, supermetafiction, post-postmodern, although it was first published in English in 1981, two years after the Italian original. It is that rare book: indescribable, except in its own terms.
As Calvino himself has said, “The things that the novel does not say are necessarily more numerous than those it does say and only a special halo around what is written can give the illusion that you are reading also what is not written.”
It is a neat description of a recent book you might find yourself reading soon: Shehan Karunatilaka’s Chats with the Dead. As you flip through it in the local bookstore among shelves more specifically named than in the Calvino book (“Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered,” or “Books That Fill You with Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified”), you notice the epigraph and find it intriguing - There are only two gods worth worshipping: chance, and electricity.
You realize that the comma is something you have added mentally, it isn’t there in the epigraph. Clearly this is a special book, with this wonderful quality – a narrative in the foreground that leads you into the real story in the background. The former is about a photographer setting out to solve his own murder, the latter about a country torn apart by civil war. That much you gather from the blurb. So it is nothing like the Sri Lankan writer’s previous novel Chinaman except for the foreground-background template. That used cricket as the sieve to strain some of the same issues.
The new book is a whodunit while the earlier was a where-is-he?
There is only one thing to be done. Carry the book home, and changing the relevant names, follow Calvino’s advice. His book begins thus: “You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If On a Winter’s Day a Traveller. Relax, concentrate, dispel every other thought….Find the most comfortable position: seated, stretched out, curled up or lying flat, on your stomach, on your side…”
Two self-reflexive novels for self-reflecting times.
(Suresh Menon is Contributing Editor, The Hindu)