Philip Hart wrote: > Hi, could someone post an appreciation of this book? I read it > without getting anything out of it (well, the fairy tale aspect was > sort of interesting) and gave it to a friend who paints, figuring > he might be able to enjoy it. In particular the scene about > politics in art annoyed me, and I was never much interested in the > Monster. Maybe I just need to be proselytized. > - Philip Well, Philip, it's been a few years since I've read the book, but I've read it at least five times and I'm definitely going to read it another five times before I'm done. Let me try to tell you why... I see Brust as an artist with his writing. He's also a musician, as we know, but Brust is primarily a writer. What struck me about a lot of his books is the 'framework' that he's writing in. Not to digress, it's actually important, but there's a dialogue by Plato called _Phaedo_ in which the story is set up by having a man ask Phaedo if he was there when Socrates died. After some discussion, the man asks Phaedo to relate the story of Socrates' death and the philisophical discussion about death that Socrates and his friends had that day. Now, why did Plato write it that way? Why didn't he just relate the discussion directly, instead of couching it in this framework? And that's not the only dialogue that he did that on. Most of Plato's dialogues are told directly, but a few of them are couched in very strange frameworks. The most notable is probably the _Symposium_, where Apollodorus repeats to his companion the dialogue which he had heard >from Aristodemus, and had already once narrated to Glaucon. This is confusing. Why did Plato write it this way and not any other? I don't know yet. All I know is that I've read some Plato and discussed it with others, and I've come to the conclusion that Plato never did anything without purposefully doing it. I think Brust is remarkably similar. I think that he never writes something like a framework without thinking carefully about it and choosing to write that way. In The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars, he has set up an extraordinary framework: each chapter has six parts, each part is the same in every chapter, and, finally, each part relates to what the main character is going through. All of them are interesting to me, but perhaps the most interesting are the musings about what the main character thinks art is, and the folktale that is the sixth part of each chapter. What's interesting about the art is that I've always wondered what makes one thing 'art' and what makes another thing 'not art.' I build instruments in my spare time (violins and cellos so far) and I know that this building of instruments is more engineering than art. After all, one is restricted in form and function--if a violin didn't look like a violin, it wouldn't be a violin; if it sounded like a saxophone, it would probably be worth a lot of money, but it wouldn't be a violin. :) So it was interesting to see another human being's opinions on what made art...even if he didn't know himself why he thought the way that he did. (Interestingly, I once loaned this book to a friend of mine, and she refused to read it, saying that the main character was far too sexist for her to read past the first chapter...I wonder if Brust knew that, and if he did, whether or not the main character had any idea?) The last part of each chapter (the retelling of the legend or fairy-tale) is, literature-wise, most interesting to me. The main character mentions at one point that he doesn't quite remember how the story goes, or that he might be making it up a bit as he goes along, but he's getting the gist of it correct...what that means to me is that Brust is having the main character change this story as he experiences the things in his life--the studio, the other artists, the woman who sells a painting that he thinks isn't 'art,' everything. I want to re-read this book again someday and pay attention to exactly how that last part of each chapter relates to the other five parts. I'm certain that it is affected by the painting of the Monster, and, similarly, that the Monster is affected by everything else. The whole book is a web of six parts relating to each other. In short, I like this book because it is an interesting puzzle, like most of Brusts works. It isn't a standard mystery, it's a mystery about the book itself. Why did Brust write it in the exacting framework that he did, each chapter set up into six parts, and each part talking about a specific thing? It wasn't just to be cool, or neat, no matter what he says...he did it for a reason, even if that reason was simply to challenge himself as a writer. (Of course, Brust is like that, always dividing things up into parts and analyzing the parts--just look at the houses: each house in Dragaera epitomizes a certain aspect of humanity. Brust uses this technique of division frequently...which is fine, as long as the whole is not different than the sum of the parts that it's made of!) Well, there's my piece as to why TStM&tS is one of Brusts most challenging and rewarding works to read. Cheers! -Jason