Friday, April 17, 2009

Creative Nonficiton

Currently reading Tiziano Terzani's A Fortune Teller Told Me.
A true story of a man who went to see a fortune teller in Hong Kong in the Spring of 1976. The fortune teller told him not to fly in 1993. When that year came he was a journalist based in Bangkok, not willing to give up his international life style or get on an airplane.

In college I studied English literature. In the post-college book club, Paper Cutz we primarily read fiction that, I suppose, could be classified as classics.

Recently, I have been appreciating creative nonfiction more than I have ever appreciated any genre. Terzani writes a secondary source to my own life as he describes the whole of Japanese society "in a straight jacket, the people are always playing a part and cannot behave naturally" (216).
And I find answers to cultural questions I have had about peoples expectations "in Asia (where) gratitude is more binding than any contract"(231).
Meanwhile, I am awoken to lines of factual poetry: "It was the sort of dawn that leaves you with an eternal sense of nostalgia"(261).

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