Week 4

I have officially finished one of my American Author books - Invisible Monsters. This week I started my second book - Lullaby. I read to page 35.

Lullaby is about the mysterious death of infants after their parents read to them page 27 of a lullaby book entitled Poems and Rhymes from Around the World. On page 27 there is what is known as an African culling song which is meant to give a painless death to old or sickly people. The lyrics are fatal when read. The deaths of these infants are seen through the eyes of two people. A Helen Hoover Boyle, a real estate agent who specializes in haunted houses, and a Mr. Streator (the narrator), a reporter who has witnessed the tragedy of sudden infant death first hand and has made it a priority to cover these mysterious death stories.

I think that one major theme that will develop in this book is that of distraction. The narrator builds extremely detailed architecture models to keep his mind of of being alone after his child and wife died. his neighbors are what he refers to as "distraction-oholics" and "focus-ophobics" (p. 18). They all blast their radios and televisions or talk loudly on their phones because they can't hand the quietness. Palahniuk ties these event together using distraction as a theme in the following quote"
"The music and laughter eat away at your thoughts. The noise blots them out. All the sound distracts. Your head aches from the glue"
A line that he repeats throughout the first few chapters as relates to this idea of distraction, "The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything up close" (p. 21) This relates to his work on the tiny home models.
Palahniuk also compares the distraction theme to competition in the the following quote:
"You turn up your music to hide the noise. Other people turn up their music to hide yours. You turn up yours again. Everyone buys a bigger stereo system. This is the arms race of sound. You don't win with a lot of treble. This isn't about quality. It's about volumes. This isn't about music. This is about winning." I think he is trying to say that everyone try to distract themselves. they block out reality and each other.

Our prompt this week is about how our author uses symbolism in their writing. I don't think that Palahniuk relies on symbols in his writing very often. I can't think of any that stood out in Invisible Monsters (although this could be because I have already finished it an it is much harder to recall the subtly of symbolism after-the-fact). Maybe you could consider the tiny house models in Lullaby that Mr. Steator builds a symbol for distraction. Especially the line about forgetting the big picture.