This is by far the most difficult book I have ever read. But that’s because it’s not really a book, but rather a whodunnit with multiple narrators, multiple murderers, and multiple murder victims, in a book where the pages are out of order.
To be honest, I can’t tell you much about this book other than its history and that it will be the bane of my existence for the foreseeable future. The Guardian has a great article on it’s history, so rather than reinventing the wheel, go ahead and check it out here.
So how, am I handling Cain’s Jawbone? Well, for one, I’m not doing it alone. This is a project that my husband and I are going to be working on together. Secondly, I’m not taking the pages apart. At least not yet. Instead, I’ve created a massive (and I do mean massive) spreadsheet that has one sheet for each page. We are marking down characters, literary references, dates, tenses and languages the narrator speaks, and more. Basically, we are going through each page multiple times looking for one specific thing.
I also have a separate page that is specifically for narrators. I am marking who we think the narrators are, and what their relationships to other characters are. We are also including who they killed if it is obvious they killed someone.
Lastly, I have a page that is putting the pages in order. Using a mix of poetry and dates, I have a semblance of an order for a handful of the pages. I know that there are like 75 more that need to be put in order, but I’m still working on it.
One of the things that makes this book so difficult, at least in my opinion, is that we are decades past when this was published, and there are references to things that are just not a thing anymore. On top of that, this was originally published in England, which means there are cultural references that I won’t understand either.
That being said, I’m totally game for a puzzle…even if it takes me forever to solve!
Jenn V. Reads 