The Suburbs, Sarnod, Traitors, and Tidbeck

I can't stop listening to The Suburbs by Arcade Fire, and especially the title track, along with track 9, "Suburban War". The music's sad and beautiful and yet alive and vibrant. Something about that line "Sometimes I can't believe it/I'm moving past the feeling" really gets to me. The song and the CD are rapidly becoming the soundtrack to my novel Borne, although my interpretation of the lyrics is for a kind-of post-collapse city and the regret and nostalgia and emotion in the music is all being channeled into another place. Something similar happened when I listened to the Robbers in the High Street EP while reading Pullman's Dark Materials trilogy--something in the mood of the songs fit the books so well, had a kind of magical, dark, wintery feel to them.I'm now past the 30,000-word mark in Borne and I think the long time between finishing Finch and starting Borne means I have a lot of pent-up fiction in me. I'm still in an altered state and ideas and dialogue and scenes continue to pour out of me. All it takes is getting to the coffee shop in the morning and three hours later I kinda look at my scribblings in a daze. I feel really lucky. I held onto Borne the last three years while writing other things. I took the rough scenes I had and notes and set them aside, and trusted that it'd all still be there when I got back. In fact, the time apart seems to have enriched the material and given it life and depth only hinted at before. And I'm even more convinced that the core of the story, which I've not even alluded to anywhere (and will not), is unique and powerful.In other news, I just posted a review on Amazon's Omnivoracious blog of the new John le Carre novel, Our Kind of Traitor. I'm sure some sloppy reviewer somewhere will say something like "a welcome return to form," which is the kind of review he's been getting for the past six or seven novels. Le Carre's become one of those novelists who get that reaction a lot, in part, I guess, because we're surprised he's still around. "Oh, that guy? He was good. But then he sucked for awhile. But he's turned it around this time. Or maybe it was that time or that time, or that other time."(One book was small and one book was slightly smaller, but Alice noticed that the small book contained merely a world while the slightly smaller book contained worlds. "I'll take the slightly smaller book," Alice told the Caterpillar, "because there's more inside of it." "It's written in a language you can't read," the Caterpillar said. To which Alice haughtily replied, "Read?! Did I say I was going to read it? I'm going to live in it. My, the impudence of metamorphosally-arrested butterflies around here. This neighborhood's going to heck in handbasket." As she said those words, the Caterpillar stood up, pointed to the violet-tinged sky, let out a single shriek...and unpeeled from head to end like a cheap zippered bag. Out stepped the members of the band Abba, each with iridescent green butterfly wings. The lead singer stepped forward and said, "Oh, you will read it, Alice, or you'll spend an eternity with the Mad Hatter, and we don't mean Johnny Depp. You'll learn Swedish and you'll like it, and you'll even learn how to pronounce the writer's name, Karin Tidbeck." Alice wanted to say, "Can't I wait for the English translations?" but found that she had turned into a reindeer and her mouth was stuffed with cloudberries. Somewhere an exhausted and empty bag of Swedish cliches sighed and blew away.)