Cultural Dessert

'Black Box' by Jennifer Egan

26 October 2012

One of my favourite recent novels was 'A Visit from the Goon Squad' by Jennifer Egan (reviewed here in July 2011). I've just read Jennifer Egan’s latest book ‘Black Box’ which takes one of the characters from ‘A Visit from the Good Squad’ into a story of her own. But ‘Black Box’ is a very different kind of book. It is extremely short (really a short story rather than a novel), it is written entirely in the second person and it was originally written (and published) entirely on Twitter. The story therefore consists of a series of short sentences, each no more than 140 characters. At first this feels very odd and disjointed but soon you get used to the rhythm and poetry of this structure and you focus on the story itself. It’s a peculiarly interesting and enjoyable experiment.

Labels: Books

posted by Robin Simpson @ 5:00 pm