This book was like a literary autostereogram for me. Do you know what autostereograms are? Those "Magic Eye" things where you stare at a 2D field of colors/patterns and you're supposed to be able to see a 3D image? Well, I can't see them. I stare and I stare and I can see where the 3D thing is supposed to be but I can never tell what it is. That's EXACTLY how I felt about this book.I read through a lot of positive reviews of The Interrogative Mood and I think I can sort of see what people mean when they talk about what the book achieves, or what its purpose is, or what it's about to them. I know they're (mostly) not making it up, and they really see something there, and I'm fairly certain that if my brain worked just a little differently than it does, I'd be able to see something cool, too. But my brain works how it works, and all I can see is 160-something pages of questions. A book of questions. It would be so easy to mimic the conceit and write a whole review in the interrogative mood but it seems that someone out there would have done that by now. The novel? is split into sections and appears to follow the standard conventions that make up an novel. There are paragraphs and sections. As a reader, I constantly found myself being pushed and pulled; pushed outside the novel to reflect on the structure and pulled in by the questions. The push begins almost immediately as you try to figure if and how this question relates to the previous one. There is some trying to makes sense of what it means to be a paragraph and a section. Sometimes the questions relate in the same way as an interviewer does with follow on questions. Other times there are similar disparate questions that converge lately. There are a few lines that repeat themselves and then draw attention to the repeat question by asking if the author had already asked the question or asking whether you answered the same way.Some of the questions are rhetorical, phrased awkwardly or provide exposition to only ask a did that make sense to you type ending. Some of the fact did-you-know questions were a bit tricky as they almost begged to be googled. This is the pull part of the novel. Where exclamation points poke you in the eye, question marks are like fish hooks that drag you back to the question. Most novels rely on the story and characters to draw you in and forget that you are reading a book. This one draws the reader out by asking questions that you want to answer, or know the answer to. Questions that will eventually draw me to look them up are does an oyster have a heart? and Where does such an egg come from? It made me comfortable with not knowing in an age where everything seemingly can be found out and feels like it sorta should be known. These questions remind us that not all is knowable nor should be. I make it sound like some serious book but it ain't. It is funny and thought provoking. I'm not really sure who I want to read this book but there are a lot of folks, especially readers, who would get a kick out of the disorientation of the text. Like reading a book that is told in the second person, this is an exhilarating text when it works but its failures are at least amusing.
What do You think about The Interrogative Mood (2009)?
I enjoyed it. Made me reflect on my day-to-day life + proved to be pretty amusing at times.
—Mackie
