{"id":49,"date":"2007-11-26T22:55:48","date_gmt":"2007-11-27T02:55:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/2007\/11\/26\/end-of-nanoremo-for-me\/"},"modified":"2007-11-26T22:56:10","modified_gmt":"2007-11-27T02:56:10","slug":"end-of-nanoremo-for-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/2007\/11\/26\/end-of-nanoremo-for-me\/","title":{"rendered":"End of NaNoReMo for Me"},"content":{"rendered":"

I finished Catch-22<\/em> yesterday, bringing to an end my active participation in Matthew’s NaNoReMo project<\/a>.\u00a0 I’m a little bit ahead of the schedule that Matthew set out for those of us in this virtual book club, but I have to go off to a conference for work on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, and I don’t know what kind of Internet accessiblity I’m going to have in my hotel, so I thought I’d put down a few thoughts on this book now.\u00a0\u00a0 Anybody who happens to be visiting from the defectiveyeti community and browsing, beware:\u00a0 there may be spoilers after the jump and I don’t want to potentially ruin the book for you!I found the last ten or\u00a0eleven chapters of this book absolutely gripping.\u00a0 I have to admit that when NaNoReMo first started, and people were kvetching about the repetition and circularity of Heller’s writing, I didn’t get it.\u00a0 I had read this book at least twice before, and what I remembered about the book was the laugh out loud moments.\u00a0 I confess to a fondness for absurdist humour, which no doubt\u00a0gives me a bit of a boost in\u00a0the Heller-enjoyment column, but I truly couldn’t understand it at first when people were talking about how hard it was to get through this book and mentioning many previous failed attempts to finish it.\u00a0 Somewhere near the middle of the book this time through, though, I could kind of see it – the repetitive nature of basically the same absurd joke being phrased and rephrased was starting to play a little bit on my mind, a phenomenon no doubt aided in no small measure by the fact that – as I have already pointed out – I have read the book at least twice before.\u00a0 I have an excuse for feeling my own sense of deja vu about this book.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Then, though, I got to the last few chapters and I felt the love for this book all over again.\u00a0 Favourite passage:<\/p>\n

The chaplain had mastered, in a moment of divine intuition, the handy technique of protective rationalization, and he was\u00a0 exhilirated by his discovery.\u00a0 It was miraculous.\u00a0 It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice.\u00a0 Anybody could do it;\u00a0 it required no brains at all.\u00a0 It merely required no character.<\/p>\n

(Chapter 34, “Thanksgiving”;\u00a0 p.363 of the 2004 Simon and Schuster special edition paperback).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The inexorable resolution of the plot details – the sudden and shocking death of Kid Sampson and McWatt, and the preposterous “death” of Doc Daneeka;\u00a0 the offhand, almost parenthetical brutality with which Aarfy rapes and murders the woman in Rome – building towards\u00a0the terrible climax that had been hinted at and foreshadowed so many times in the\u00a0scene with Snowden.\u00a0\u00a0Although it was the humour I remembered so clearly, this was the stuff that\u00a0made an impact on me.<\/p>\n

In the final analysis, I think the best thing that can be said about Catch-22<\/em> is that it is art that is in that “one of a kind, instantly recognizable” vein.\u00a0\u00a0You could pluck virtually any three pages of the book, completely at random out of the middle of the story somewhere and you’d still recognize the passages as having come from Catch-22 <\/em>even if you forgot the names of the characters (something I have never had any difficulty doing with any<\/em> book, I might add).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I finished Catch-22 yesterday, bringing to an end my active participation in Matthew’s NaNoReMo project. I’m a little bit ahead of the schedule that Matthew set out for those of us in this virtual book club, but I have to go off to a conference for work on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, and I don’t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}