Haddon, Mark    The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Some of my notes from re-reading 5/08:

Christopher's pure logic leads to surprising flights of imagination (or vivid logical projection) - eg. p. 69, alien spaceships

Christopher likes to think of his book as a detective story.  There are several layers of "detection" available to the reader: eg., C's rendering of conversations is very straightforward reporting (He said this.  She said this.  I said this.) and is deceptively simple, but leads the reader to fill in the gaps in social meaning by reading the verbal and physical cues C can report but not decipher.

Right from the start, C approaches the situation (dog killed with fork) wiht observation and logic.  Reader knows to react with laughter, horror, etc., but C does not.  Interesting dissonance right from page 1.

Uses just a few words to describe people, and they are surprisingly impersonal and to the reader appear a bit random.  Eg. describes his mom p. 19.

Always relays numbers in digit form (not written out).  Adds to sense that scenes that would be emotional for us are of more mathematical interest to him, or that he is dedicated to reporting things accurately, or that's simply how his mind categorizes things.  Eg. "Mother died 2 years ago."  p.22

Surprising perspective - neatly conveys two things at once to the reader - turns sudden corners on us: eg. pp. 22-23: "Father looked away...  This was nice."  Reader responds to the cue "Father looked away" knowing Father was upset, or hiding info; C mainly feels relief not to be looked at.  Eg. #2: p. 23  When C finds out his mom is in hospital, he says: "'Can we visit her?' I asked, because I like hospitals."  Not b/c he's worried about her, but b/c he likes hospitals!  This simple bait and switch conveys a lot with the immediate disconcerting sense that C has very different  responses from the ones we've been socially conditioned to read and respond.

Why is he named Christopher?  Makes a point of telling us the derivation (Christ carrier).