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Have you read any of Lorrie Moore's second person stories? "Self-Help" is a collection of them. They tend to have two effects - either they seem to implicate the reader (as in Calvino's) or function as self-talk even more close than first person (which always seems to talk to someone else; second person is almost addressing yourself) - which is what Moore's stories do.
As far as "If" is concerned, I was thinking about it and I do think that works, partly because there is such a blur between the "layers" - the books versus the narrative versus the you or me reading the book. How are we any different then the Reader and the Other Reader?
Probably one of the strongest sections was when Calvino breaks out and addresses both readers at once; you get the sense that the entire thing is focused at the male Reader, which raises questions of being 'shut out' for women readers (quite often in my fiction workshops, a lot of my male classmates have problems with women writing second person because it shuts them out as men), and then all of a sudden Ludmilla is addressed, as representative of female readers, and it throws the thing out the window. The question of her being a character is blurred as well all of a sudden.
Other favourite sections are the counterfeit country that the Reader is locked up in, and Silas Flannery's diary. What did people think of Flannery's diary? He gets a first person narrative, and it's an interesting meditation on getting caught up in real life events or situations that bleed into your stories... |
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