I'm still not convinced we read the same review. Especially when you think that the sentence above correlates with "he seems completely oblivious to the idea that there might be other ways to understand the book than his own.".
I think maybe you think I've been using the 'understand' to mean 'understand the meaning of the individual stories'? Whereas what I've actually been using it to mean is 'understand the aims of the book'. The idea that the ambiguity, the balance between the literal and the metaphoric, might be the point doesn't seem to really occur to him. And that amuses me, because I think it's so obviously central to Link's work, and because I'm not quite sure how you can read the book and not get that. So I start to wonder why, and maybe Westerfeld's right and it's a lack of familiarity with the genre; but maybe Geneva's right and Knight just isn't sure how to react to confusion. Either way, although it's a positive review, and I'm glad about that, I'm not sure it says much that's useful about Magic for Beginners.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-08-13 03:21 pm (UTC)I think maybe you think I've been using the 'understand' to mean 'understand the meaning of the individual stories'? Whereas what I've actually been using it to mean is 'understand the aims of the book'. The idea that the ambiguity, the balance between the literal and the metaphoric, might be the point doesn't seem to really occur to him. And that amuses me, because I think it's so obviously central to Link's work, and because I'm not quite sure how you can read the book and not get that. So I start to wonder why, and maybe Westerfeld's right and it's a lack of familiarity with the genre; but maybe Geneva's right and Knight just isn't sure how to react to confusion. Either way, although it's a positive review, and I'm glad about that, I'm not sure it says much that's useful about Magic for Beginners.