{"id":2331,"date":"2019-05-14T17:00:35","date_gmt":"2019-05-14T05:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/?p=2331"},"modified":"2025-05-29T21:17:59","modified_gmt":"2025-05-29T09:17:59","slug":"the-beat-of-the-pendulum-catherine-chidgey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/2019\/05\/14\/the-beat-of-the-pendulum-catherine-chidgey\/","title":{"rendered":"The Beat of the Pendulum — Catherine Chidgey"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This experimental “found novel” is great. Once I got into it, it was like a beautifully edited minimalistic fly-on-the-wall documentary in print.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Every day for a year, Catherine Chidgey recorded or wrote down a conversation, email, overheard snippet, advertisement or some other piece of text. That’s what this book is. Initially it’s pretty disorienting as there’s only speech — no introductions, descriptions or even “he said” or “she said”. It takes a while to figure out who the characters are and what their relationships are. Even by the end of the book I was still losing track of who was talking during long conversations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This situation featured in the book I read after this one: Lost in a Good Book<\/em>, the second book in the literary sci-fi comedy thriller series (really) by Jasper Fforde. There’s a joke about literary characters having trouble keeping track of unattributed dialogue. Maybe that means I am actually fictional. I think I prefer not to consider that possibility for now. Anyway, those Jasper Fforde books have a lot of fun ideas: they’re well worth reading even though they are different from The Beat of the Pendulum<\/em> in almost every way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was also a connection to the previous book I had read. I was surprised when some of the characters in The Beat of the Pendulum<\/em> talked about Mikhail Bulgakov’s classic novel The Master and Margarita<\/em> — that was the book I read before this one. What an amazing coincidence! I thought. But then I realised it’s probably similar to the way that once you get pregnant, you suddenly start seeing pregnant women and babies everywhere. It just primes your attention. Read a Russian novel, and you’ll start seeing them everywhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I enjoyed the fact that this book was connected in some way to my previous and subsequent reads. But there is also a connection to my life in general. I enjoy reading NZ fiction partly because I often recognise the settings. This book was even better as I eventually figured out that I know some of the supporting characters. It turns out that friends of mine know Catherine quite well and feature in this book. That counts as a brush with fame for them, so for me it’s a brush with a brush with fame. Maybe that’s as close as I want to get.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This experimental “found novel” is great. Once I got into it, it was like a beautifully edited minimalistic fly-on-the-wall documentary in print. Every day for a year, Catherine Chidgey recorded or wrote down a conversation, email, overheard snippet, advertisement or … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2305,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[4,168,19,63],"class_list":["post-2331","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-review","tag-books","tag-catherine-chidgey","tag-new-zealand","tag-novels"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2331","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2331"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2331\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4479,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2331\/revisions\/4479"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2305"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2331"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2331"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}