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Anyone read Widdershins by Charles DeLint? He does an amazing job of shifting POV every chapter (and sometimes within a chapter).
Some chapters are 3rd person limited, some are 1st, and the 1st person chapters are different characters! Each chapter title is the name of the character(s) whose POV you're in. Oh, and some chapters are present tense, some past.
It sounds absolutely insane, but the story flows so well, he pulls it off. I haven't had a moment's disorientation from it. Has anyone seen other books written this way (successfully)?
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Some of Heinlein's later work varied considerably in viewpoint and tense---but his stuff, even before that, tended towards the episodic, and if one episode is told differently, it's hard to say whether a change from first person to third, or back again, is a disruption.
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quote:Has anyone seen other books written this way (successfully)?
MrsBrown, I haven't read WIDDERSHINS, though I've read other books by DeLint and enjoyed them. I'll have to see about adding it to my to-be-read pile.
I have read a book that really impressed me with the way it handled time shifts using POV. The story has three basic timelines, and the author made it clear to me very quickly just which timeline each new section was in by the way she handled the point of view.
The book won the 1996 Nebula for novel: SLOW RIVER by Nicola Griffith. It might qualify for an R-rating, though, because of the some of the subject matter, but it was an amazing book.
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William Faulkner shifted point of view chapter by chapter in (God! I forget the name of the book!) I think it was Absolom, where the mom died, and each chapter reflects the point of view of her family members. Of course I read this book decades ago, so my memory is little fuzzy. I do remember the shifting points of view though, and being impressed.
I will have to read that Charles De Lint book. It sounds great.
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