I Read A Short Story Today

Thursday, December 06, 2007

A.L. Kennedy, "Frank"

Frank sits in a movie theater all alone.

(from
The Book of Other People)

Also Frank accidentally cuts his finger while cutting up some soup ingredients and lets the blood go everywhere. It's a brilliant scene, memorable, visceral, confusing, totally buyable. But. This story has a secret, or rather the author has a secret she didn't see maybe fit to put into the story. Ooh a mystery. Except I didn't figure it out. If the clues were there then I missed em, even after re-reading the obviously mysterious parts.
A.L. Kennedy has a web page.

1 Comments:

At Friday, April 4, 2008 4:49:00 PM EDT, Blogger Dylan said...

I actually found this post by doing a search of the short story.
Just read it on the busride home from school today, and I had to say its complexity threw me off on first glance.

But from what I gather Frank works at a mental institution and has just lost his (from the sound of it) daughter to some terrible tragedy. The distress and pure agony of such a thing causes instability in his marriage and drives him mentally unstable.

After the fight with his wife over cutting his finger, he runs away to regain a stability--but instead throws himself into a detachment from reality.

He embraces this and only now longs to sit in the theater, watching the film that in some aspects mirrors his own life.

 

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