First you wonder if they're separate stories, but no, they're not, they're contingent stories and they form a pattern. And you begin with some of the island as the place to which the heroine of the book returns.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I think the novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers. The novel receives streams of science, philosophy, poetry and contains all of these; it's not simply telling a story.
There are two different forms of storytelling: Novels tend to come from the inside of a character, and movies tend to look at them from the outside in relation to others in their world.
True stories, autobiographical stories, like some novels, begin long ago, before the acts in the account, before the birth of some of the people in the tale.
The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers.
Novels are one of the few remaining areas of narrative storytelling where one person does almost all of the creative heavy lifting.
Storylines are how characters create the plots involved in their stories.
I come from a little island with the Caribbean Sea on one side and the Atlantic Ocean on the other. I come from, really, nowhere, and for me, the fiction and the nonfiction, creative or otherwise, all come from the same place.
Novels usually evolve out of 'character.' Characters generate stories, and the shape of a novel is entirely imagined but should have an aesthetic coherence.
If you ask me, the place that a story happens is as equal character. It's almost like an ecological viewpoint: These people are living in this piece of land, and in this piece of land in this time this is possible. For me, I almost think location first. It's time first - what year is it - then where are we, and then who is in it.
To me there's no difference between a book of stories and a novel - they're just slightly different shapes.