Question 7
If didn’t find Question 7 as engaging as Flanagan’s works of fiction, I blame myself. I read the book in snippets in the evening and didn’t grasp the connections and flow between fiction and autobiography as might have if I had read more continuously. There is also a feeling that a fiction writer doesn’t have to share the true stories behind the invented stories (here in particular, The River Guide and The Narrow Road to the Deep North ). Perhaps I mean, I’d prefer they didn’t. Others think differently, and the book has achieved high critical acclaim. In her Guardian review, Tara June Winch writes: Question 7 is Flanagan’s finest book. It is a treatise on the immeasurability of life, reminiscent of the Japanese tradition of mono no aware , the psychological and philosophical sweep of Tolstoy, and enmeshed in a personal essay that is tuned as finely as WG Sebald’s Rings of Saturn. In his Conversation piece, Dan Dixon provides a justification for Flanagan’s desire to lift th