The Tail Section

Submitted by Isabel

Recently, I was in our university library looking for reviews of a Canadian novel called The Widows.  As I thumbed through a collection of reviews, I came across a review entitled "Through The Looking Glass." Immediately, I was reminded of an episode of LOST.  For that reason alone, I read part of that review.  It was a review of a book called The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches and reads: "We embark on a journey through the universe as experienced by this young woman, appropriately named Alice, a universe encapsulated by the estate that she inhabits with her incestuously inclined brother and, up until the point when the novel begins, their autocratic father.  Waking up one morning to find their father ‘defunct’ as a result of suicide by hanging, the two siblings are left to ‘take the universe in hand’, a task complicated by the fact that they have never left the estate, where they were born."

I had never heard of this book but now I got interested and went down where, as I had quickly found out, that novel was located.  So I took it and read the description on the cover: "This wickedly inventive fabulist tale heralds the arrival of an utterly original voice in contemporary fiction.  Alone with their authoritarian father on a vast estate where time has stopped, two siblings speak a language and inhabit a surreal universe of their own making, shaped by their reading of philosophy and tales of chivalry.  When their father dies and the children set out to bury him, they encounter the inhabitants of the neighboring village for the first time, and the pair’s cloak of romance and superstition falls away to reveal the appalling truth of their existence…."

Well, somehow this reminded me even more of LOST.  Also, the whole little girl and matches thing reminds me a lot of Kate’s story.  Needless to say, I ordered the book online and can’t wait to read it. 
 
With LOST it is like every little detail and every name has a connection to some book or philosopher or theory or scientist.  And people look it up, read those books, read about those theories, scientists and philosophers. Because of LOST, suddenly I got interested in what the English philosopher John Locke had to say or in who Jeremy Bentham actually was.  I caught myself reading about the Skinner box, paying attention when I had to read Thoreau’s Walden for university, and relating Transcendentalism to a TV show.  I think LOST is a great way to make us aware of achievements we haven’t heard about or haven’t been interested in, because they were hundreds of years ago.  Maybe with people reading less and less, this is a new way of getting them interested in books, theories and ideas.  I like it.

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