Jennie

Posted on April 9th, 2007 by shayden.
Categories: Uncategorized.

        So I am almost finished reading the book (I have about 20 pages left,) and so far I really like it.  I am really eager to find out exactly what or who Jennie is.  At first, I got the impression that she is a figment of Eben’s imagination, a sort of muse for him, but since the cab driver and his land lord can see her too, I am trying to come up with another explanation of what she is.

            At first, it seems strange for Eben to approach the little girl (kind of a no no in today’s world), but he seems genuinely concerned for her.  It is odd to me that he could fall for her though, since she was just a little girl when they first met.  He gets kind of obsessive over her which is a tad creepy. 

            I really like the descriptions of the places and the artwork.  It is really believable that the story is being told through the artist’s eyes because he is so descriptive as he tells the story.  I enjoy that aspect of the novel because it is really easy to visualize his paintings and murals.  And I totally agree with how terrible the cover art is because I picture Jennie quite differently than she is portrayed on the cover. 

1 comment.

even a pencil has fear to

Pingback on April 10th, 2007.

[...] I also enjoyed this post (sorry, I don’t know whose blog this is!), because I too got really excited when I hit the last 20 pages of the novel. I simply had to find out what was going to happen, and I couldn’t read fast enough. But I have to admit, when the hurricane came, I pretty much caught on to the ending, but I still enjoyed it. I’m intrigued by the terseness or somewhat minimalist quality the text often seems to have. As this post points out, the descriptions of the artwork and settings were really quite good, but the descriptions of the action were often quite simple. For example, “Even before I telephoned out to the school, I knew what the answer would be. ‘I’m sorry; there is no one here by that name,’ I didn’t ask them to go back over their files; I knew what the answer would be to that, too. So there it was.” (67) Ah, what? Obviously he has a handle of what’s going on and has pretty much figured out “how Jennie works,” but I haven’t! What was the answer? We know the answer wasn’t what Eben was looking for, and we know he can’t find Jennie, only she can find him, but we don’t know why and he seems to. And the thing is, why only Jennie can come to him is never explicitly stated. Anyway, I can’t wait till tomorrow to see how the film version handles this. [...]

Leave a comment

Comments can contain some xhtml. Names and emails are required (emails aren't displayed), url's are optional.