Moviegoer

I finally got to borrow this book titled THE MOVIEGOER by WALKER PERCY (I always thought it's the other way round until just now. What kind of first name is WALKER?) from the library. It's a book that was long ago recommended to me in yahoo literature chatroom by some kind, well-read buddy, and was since taken note of and searched for in everywhere there was a library of sorts, and not found. What kind of fascinating book is this that got me so obsessed? I don't know, really. I knew nothing about the plot, the era it was written in and about, the genre or whatsoever. The only thing I recall is that it was mentioned and endorsed along with a string of other household names like Guy Maupassant and Kurt Vonnegut (which wasn't household name to me then but soon to become the biggest favorite, an addictive inspiration of sorts. Jude knows this only too well…) Anyway, the fact that the book had been so hard to find was probably a major drive force that propelled me along in the search. The name of this site, incidentally, was a directly plagiarized thing from the title of the book. (So is Slapstick from Vonnegut's novel…which reminds me of Woolf's words, that we are (at her time) at the fag-ends (i.e. cigarette butts) of civilization, that all that could be said are said already, and there're no more ambitious things to accomplish. She's right in a way isn't she. Or that's just a legitimate excuse to practise plagiarism.. Now that I have borrowed and read 1/8 into it, I still can't say what kind of book this is except that it strongly reminds me of Sartre's Nausea, probably influenced by it (since THE MOVIEGOER was written in 1963, 25 years after Nausea.), and the opening words sorta confirms my impression—'…the specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair. –Soren Kierkegaard, THE SICKNESS ONTO DEATH'. Kierkegaard, of course, is one of the founding fathers of existentialism, earlier than Sartre and Camus, a Danish philosopher and theist whose work wasn't much recognized until after his death. How strange it is to be confronted by existentialism in a book that had attracted and totally eluded me years before I even knew such philosophy! I hope I could write a review on it someday…