Opticians and Zombies
Jan. 30th, 2018 12:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobearI'm going to a reading retreat this weekend, and Emma Jane Kirby, the author of The Optician of Lampedusa, is going to be there, so I thought I would read the book. It's a fictionalised account of a true story - in 2013, there was a shipwreck off the coast of Lampedusa and over 300 Eritrean migrants drowned. The optician of the book's title was out sailing with his friends, and they came across the aftermath of the wreck, managing to save 47 people on their tiny fishing boat. Emma Jane Kirby is a journalist, who interviewed the optician, and then decided to write a fictional account.
The foreshadowing of the event is a little heavy-handed, and the descriptions of the scene at the very start rather destroy the tension later on when the people on the boat are trying to figure out what the noise is that they can hear (it turns out to be people screaming). However, the setting of the island is richly described, and the contrast between the minutiae of the optician's day and the horror of the wreck is very effective.
The 'telling rather than showing' style of narrative betrays the story's origins as a newspaper report, and it's a bit over-written in places, but the emotion is strong, and the author's sense of the importance of the story is very clear. I do want to ask her, though, why she didn't give the optician character a name, as it feels distancing to me, and undercuts the trauma of his experience somewhat.
About eighteen months ago, I was part of the Kickstarter for the Zombies Run Board Game, which arrived just before Christmas. At the weekend, we played it for the first time, and it was really fun. It has an accompanying app, which tells the story of what's going on, and the gameplay is mostly putting cards together to outrun the zombies. There are also choices to make about how to react to situations, and a big map to give a sense of where you are on the island. The mechanics are very simple, but there's a lot of atmostphere from the app recordings, and some additional fun in dealing with the various scenarios, with a couple of puzzles thrown in for good measure. One person has to be the leader, supplying the array of cards and dealing with button pushing on the app, while the others mostly play the cards to escape the zombies. There are multiple chapters of a continuing adventure, so we're definitely going to get together to play further, probably switching the roles around for variety.
The foreshadowing of the event is a little heavy-handed, and the descriptions of the scene at the very start rather destroy the tension later on when the people on the boat are trying to figure out what the noise is that they can hear (it turns out to be people screaming). However, the setting of the island is richly described, and the contrast between the minutiae of the optician's day and the horror of the wreck is very effective.
The 'telling rather than showing' style of narrative betrays the story's origins as a newspaper report, and it's a bit over-written in places, but the emotion is strong, and the author's sense of the importance of the story is very clear. I do want to ask her, though, why she didn't give the optician character a name, as it feels distancing to me, and undercuts the trauma of his experience somewhat.
About eighteen months ago, I was part of the Kickstarter for the Zombies Run Board Game, which arrived just before Christmas. At the weekend, we played it for the first time, and it was really fun. It has an accompanying app, which tells the story of what's going on, and the gameplay is mostly putting cards together to outrun the zombies. There are also choices to make about how to react to situations, and a big map to give a sense of where you are on the island. The mechanics are very simple, but there's a lot of atmostphere from the app recordings, and some additional fun in dealing with the various scenarios, with a couple of puzzles thrown in for good measure. One person has to be the leader, supplying the array of cards and dealing with button pushing on the app, while the others mostly play the cards to escape the zombies. There are multiple chapters of a continuing adventure, so we're definitely going to get together to play further, probably switching the roles around for variety.
