Comments on: Does Never Fall Down Stand Up to the Hype?

By: What The Newbery Award Is Not: For Thematic Choice « Fairrosa Cyber Library: Bulletin Board

Sun, 04 Nov 2012 17:46:41 +0000

[...] at SLJ’s Blogland, Karyn Silverman discusses her reaction to Never Fall Down by Patricia McCormick, a highly praised book and a National Book Award finalist based on the true story of a young [...]

By: Emily H.

Emily H. — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 00:42:49 +0000

I guess my problem with the voice is that there’s so much individuality that gets flattened out. To me, it’s like the disfluencies overwhelm the narrative voice to the extent that I don’t hear an individual narrative voice beyond those disfluencies. In other novels that are potential Printz winners, you hear sarcasm or sincerity, honesty or self-deception, plainness or ornateness in the voice. In Never Fall Down… it’s hard to hear anything beyond the English disfluencies. It makes it seem as if the only relevant facet of Chorn-Pond’s self, or his personality, is that he learned English as a second language.

As someone who learned a few languages besides English, and is constantly frustrated by not being able to express a full range of thoughts and emotions in my non-native languages, it’s a choice that makes me feel very awkward.

By: Wendy

Wendy — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 20:19:17 +0000

While I don’t want to belabor it if it doesn’t strike a chord with anyone else, I don’t want a quick previous comment to get lost in the shuffle, because I think it sums up my feelings on this really well–that the voice is impressionistic rather than representational.

Really, what it seems to come down to is that it works for me and doesn’t for some others. I didn’t get “glaring grammatical mistakes” from this; I got “imperfect second-language English”, which is the same thing with a different spin. My boyfriend’s an ESL speaker, and he also didn’t begin to learn until his late teens; fluid but not fluent by academic standards. When I’m quoting or telling stories about him verbatim, I’m always surprised at the inconsistencies in language that come up that I never notice when we talk.

Did other people have reactions to the last section of the book that were similar to Karyn’s? I guess I thought the level of detail was similar the the earlier parts. I did find it all jarring and uncomfortable, but that, too, was working for me.

By: Mark Flowers

Mark Flowers — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 18:25:56 +0000

While I think it is interesting to hear the real-life Arn, I think we have to be very careful about comparing the way he speaks to a fictional narrator in a novel. There is no reason why McCormick can’t change the facts of the way Arn speaks to fit her goals. Now, whether she succeeds or not (which was the original question) is more complicated. But I definitely don’t think we can just say – the real Arn speaks more fluently than the fictional one, therefore McCormick is wrong (I understand that no one is making precisely this argument, but that seems to be the direction in which some comments here and on Heavy Medal are leading us to).

Meanwhile, I continue to stand by my argument that inconsistencies in grammar are completely to be expected in a non-fluent speaker. As an extremely non-fluent Spanish speaker (indeed a very broken Spanish speaker), I personally find myself speaking to Spanish customers entirely in present tense verbs, wrong conjugations, etc. But then out of the blue I’ll find myself remembering “oh, that’s how you say that!” and pulling out a completely fluent (if horribly accented) sentence. So that’s my experience as a SSL speaker. As a listener of ESL speakers, I think for the most part the patrons I interact with do better than I do with my limited Spanish, but I still hear the same sort of inconsistencies. For that matter, regular, native speakers of all languages constantly engage in disfluencies, mismatching subjects and verbs, etc. It’s just that we generally don’t “hear” them because we know what we expect to hear out of native speakers.

As I write this, I realize that the core of my argument has to do with the differences between the written word and speech. Speech is surprisingly difficult, as anyone who has read an unedited transcript of spontaneous speech knows.

By: Karyn Silverman

Karyn Silverman — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 17:42:57 +0000

Thanks for that link, mslibrarian. The more I see/hear of the actual Arn Chorn-Pond’s English, the more discomfort I find I have with the voice of the book. And regardless of that, the inconsistencies still bother me; they don’t feel natural (either you use to be or you don’t; either there is a grasp of subject-verb agreement or there is not. If the language was generally closer to fluent, the occasional lapse would seem more comprehensible, but the way it’s written what I see is mostly consistent nonstandard English with the occasional lapse to grammatically correct constructions, and that I have a harder time believing.)

Wendy, as far as the last section went, I found myself wondering why we were getting so many details about the Ponds. I recognize that some of this is vital to get us to the end and the beginning of Arn as humanitarian, speaker, public figure, but I found Peter Pond’s volatile moods worrying in a way that had me wondering about him (not about Arn’s reactions). And based on some of the links folks have shared and information I found online, it appears the real Arn Chorn-Pond is incredibly fond of and grateful to Peter Pond, so some of the detail struck me as reporting because these are the facts, when they didn’t strike me as critical.

I can pull some citations if you want; I think, paging through, that it was probably not actually that many actual pages (3? 4?) of text, but those passages affected my sense of the book as a whole and overshadowed the other details of Arn’s setting in in the US, and have therefore loomed larger in memory.

By: mslibrarian

mslibrarian — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 13:12:31 +0000

For those who are curious to compare what’s in the fiction and what’s Arn’s actual speech like in print, here’s a short interview transcript: http://www.facinghistory.org/teachers/interview-transcripts/arn

Reading the transcript, one can still sense the slight unfamiliarity of English and one can see his choice of words and phrasing which definitely has a slightly different “pattern” than native speakers. But, there are no page-ful of glaring grammatical mistakes and inconsistencies.

By: mslibrarian

mslibrarian — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 12:28:00 +0000

I wrote, “I can buy Mark’s argument that a non-native speakers are not always consistant in their subject/verb matches or even verb tenses.” Which should have a follow-up sentence stating that the overwhelming amount of such inconsistencies and their placements in the book do not feel organic — they seem forced and they do not, to my own “English as a Second Language” radar, capture Arn’s actual speaking patterns.

By: Wendy

Wendy — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 12:22:48 +0000

I thought the rhythm/cadence of the written narrative corresponded fairly well with the recording of Chorn-Pond from NPR that Roxanne Feldman posted over on Heavy Medal, http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=1344101&m=1344102. His English is probably better than what’s written, but the overall effect was, I thought, very similar. The narrative needed to strike a balance wherein the English was “broken” enough to get that effect across–if the errors were only occasional, I think they would drag the reader out of the story even more–but not so “broken” as to be difficult to understand.

Someone brought up somewhere the question of how teen readers, less likely to intellectually analyze the language used, would respond to this; some seem to think this would leave them with a negative impression of–I’m not sure, Chorn-Pond? Cambodians? I really expect this to work even better for those who don’t stop to do a close analysis of the voice, which is perhaps more impressionistic than representative. But I would be very interested to hear teen reactions to this book.

By: mslibrarian

mslibrarian — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 12:06:36 +0000

Wendy, I can buy that present day presentation in 1st person present tense argument. (reluctantly) Then — how do we explain the way he “speaks” with these many mistakes and inconsistencies? I can buy Mark’s argument that a non-native speakers are not always consistant in their subject/verb matches or even verb tenses. McCormick’s author’s note states that she tried to capture the beautiful cadence of Arn’s speech, and I wonder how successfully she achieved that. To me, she simply managed to present a foreign born person’s inability to manage English (while in real life he manages quite well.) And how would the intended audience interpret this broken English scenario?

By: Wendy

Wendy — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 03:01:34 +0000

My feeling is that the voice is meant to represent Chorn-Pond addressing an audience of English speakers, now. Isn’t that the most likely scenario? Honestly, it puzzles me that it would be thought anything else, though I’m reading the discussion here and elsewhere with interest and try to look at it from each point of view. Many lecturers and storytellers choose to tell a story in the first person, so that doesn’t bother me, either. And that’s why his level of fluency doesn’t change. His way of looking at the world DOES change, as would be expected from someone growing from child to adolescent within the narrative.

But I think you’re right: whether this voice works for the reader is highly individual. I don’t think there are passages I can pull out here to convince anyone, though I hope the more abstract arguments make people think.

Karyn, can you expand on what you didn’t like about the last section? It didn’t provide the happy ending I desperately wanted, maybe needed, but it was certainly more challenging, and I did appreciate that.

I don’t know that this makes my top, say, five books for the Printz, in a literary sense, but reading it and discussing it has certainly enriched my life.