Blog #6: The Pink Institution

There is a lot of interesting writing eing published recently. It's like we, as a society of writers, have decided that it's time to take that plain old format of paragraphs on a page from start to end of a book and throw it out the window. No book that i've read recently shows this change in style than Selah Saterstrom's "The Pink Institution". Styled like it's a play or show, with an opening act and the sections of the book set up as if parts of a preformance, Pink Instution starts it's unique aura right off with the table of contents. It contains pictures, pages where all the words have huge gaps in between them and seem to not always flow, program guides from The Confederate Ball of 1938, and what could loosely be considered annoatated lists. It goes even deeper then formatting, however, as once you start reading you realize that Satersstrom not only changed from the conventional format, but also how a book is written. The story feels disjuncted and confusing at first. Clips of a person's life that turn into clips of a family's life that extends into an umbrella effect of lists and details that give you the entire lives and personalities of the people involved in the story. No character is left unexplored and at the end of the book, it feels like you have grown to know each and everyone of th characters.

At risk of spoilers I wont delve into the plot all too much (which I wouldn't normally do as this is an assignment but my god please go read this book!), but all I can say is that you get the gritty and realistic life stories of a set of almost absurdly unfortunate people. Saterstrom gives up this wave of emotion that I think can only be obtained through the unqiue style that Straterstrom has employed.

This book is so different from anything I have ever read that a comparison between two is almost impossible. It doesn't flow normally, it doesn't develop characters normally, it doesn't really do anything normally at all. The only book that even comes close in my mind is "The Great Gatsby", and purely from a perspective part. We see this story through the storytelling mind of a character that, despite being involved, feels almost outside and thirdperson to the entire story. Other than this comparison, I have no clue how to compare such a unique and extraordinarily new book to any other.

All in all, go read this book! It's a quick read that I personally couldn't put down.

You can find it here: http://coffeehousepress.org/shop/the-pink-institution-2/