Added by: stovokor | Karma: 1758.60 | Fiction literature | 15 January 2009
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A Spot of Bother is the second adult novel by the author Mark Haddon, who is best known as the writer of his prize-winning first novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. This is Haddon's second novel to deal with mental health issues from the point-of-view of the patient, the first being The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time.
An early excerpt of A Spot of Bother (at that point titled Blood and Scissors) was published in the book New Beginnings, the proceeds from which benefited the victims of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake.
Swedish Fairy Tales by Herman Hofberg translated by W. H. Myers (Rare Book Collection)
It is probably known to most readers that there is a distinction between Tradition and Saga. Tradition has, or at least seems to have, to do with facts, usually designating some particular spot or region where the incident is said to have taken place, often even giving the names of actors, while the Saga is entirely free in its scope, equally as regards incident, and the time and place of its happening. Not infrequently the traditions of a people are founded upon actual historical occurrences, which, often repeated in the naive manner of the peasantry, become, finally, folk-lore. A great many are, however, drawn from ancient myths, which, in time, become clad in historical garb, and are located in some particular place.
The title The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (or the curious incident of the dog in the night-time as it appears within the book) is an appropriate one for Mark Haddon's ingenious novel both because of its reference to that most obsessive and fact-obsessed of detectives, Sherlock Holmes, and because its lower-case letters indicate something important about its narrator.
Christopher is an intelligent youth who lives in the functional hinterland of autism--every day is an investigation for him because of all the aspects of human life that he does not quite get.
