The Bare Necessities—Frederick Reiken (DAY FOR NIGHT)

2010 at 5am     Posted by Rebecca Schinsky

The Bare Necessities is a series in which writers and bookish folk share annotated reading lists of the books they can’t live without.

Frederick Reiken’s stunning novel Day for Night is, simply put, one of the very best of the year, and I really can’t stop raving about it. Day for Night is essentially a set of interconnected short stories that add up to a whole that is far more than the sum of its parts and that play with time and narrative structure in creative, boundary-pushing ways. I’m thrilled (really, it’s all I can do not to throw panties at this post alone) to welcome him here today with a guest post about other books that also play with time. The list, Time Travel 101, is based on a course he teaches.

Time Travel 101:

I often like novels that in some manner or other seem to bend, rift, warp, or otherwise transcend time, and for years I have been thinking about why novels can do this.  One hypothesis is that a text can play with time and move around nonlinearly because of the manner in which we conceptualize a narrative.  We imagine a story as unfolding in time, but actually, the only thing that unfolds in time is our private act of reading and imagining it.  Likewise, the author’s act of writing the book was a process that unfolded in time, but a completed text becomes a spatial thing, and a book that you can hold in your hands is a timeless whole.  Rip out the pages and you’ll see what I mean.  Once you lay all those pages along the floor of your living room (okay, don’t really do this), you can walk from one page to the next and back again.

Here is my other recent discovery about all this.  What a conventional story-oriented narrative usually employs is a literary application of the temporal construct known as “block time” or a “block universe” – in which time is envisioned spatially, as if it were a four-dimensional space-time map.  That’s why we accept, without hesitation, the simple literary technique of a flashback.  Within the spatialized time frame of a novel, the effect of jumping to a flashback is less like going back in time and more like getting on an airplane in New Jersey and then getting off in Texas.  For a more exaggerated way of thinking about block time, consider protagonist Billy Pilgrim in Kurt Vonnegut’s landmark novel Slaughterhouse-Five.   Billy has become “unstuck in time,” and has no control over which part of his life he will wind up in next.  All the moments of his life — present, past, future — can be arrived at as if they were geographic places.  What I’ll suggest is that a conventional, realistic work of literary fiction makes use of the same apparatus minus the spasmodic time travel.  Instead of the protagonist becoming unstuck in time, the author simply moves the reader around within the block-time map.  In other words, the reader is the one who becomes unstuck, because the story can go anywhere it wants.

With this in mind, here is an annotated list of a several novels and short stories that play with time in compelling ways and in most cases also happen to be amazing.    Read more