#732 Blues- John Keene
As with all the stories found in John Keene’s excellent collection Counternarratives, "Blues"challenges the reader with an interesting and off-beat format. The narration is fed to us one sentence at a time separated by ellipses. I’m not sure how it effected other readers, but for my experience I found myself speeding up as I read, making the story more and more frantic as I went. This was made even more so on the last page as the sentences gave way to smaller phrases and single words.
This is the world through the eyes of a traveler, a lover of the arts, perhaps an artist him (her) self. The teller of the story jumps from city to city, enjoying the sites and the history as he goes. There is some pretention, at times a lot of it as he references artists and poets often just by first name in a manner than seems more like name dropping than homage.
The last lines mention solitude and the blues, but there is a definite sadness among the excitement felt throughout the running script.
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