Dislocation

I am currently reading Man Walks Into a Room, by Nicole Krauss. (I've written a little before about how I am terribly jealous of her.) Apparently sometimes I am bitchy. Case in point: when amnesiac Samson flies into LA, he tells the neuroscientist who picks him up, "I probably came [here] once or twice when I was a kid. I feel like I've been here." And the response: "You watch a lot of movies? Because it unsettles even people who live in L.A.: the nagging sense that they've seen a part of the city before, exactly like this." Um, I really don't feel that way. I recognize things, and am pleased or not, depending. It's certainly not unsettling. So minus points to Krauss.

Except then... 12 pages later another character tells Samson about sticking around at Stanford after finishing his degree, and hanging out with guys in Symbolic Systems. SymSys?? I didn't expect to see that in a book. And then, in another 4 pages: "They ate dinner at a plastic picinic table outside the India Sweets and Spices Mart on Venice Boulevard." Wait, where? The cheap Indian place down the street where they yell at you if you don't order quickly enough? The one I walked by this afternoon on my way back from Trader Joe's? And there, perhaps, is the feeling the neuroscientist mentioned. Unsettling, as though characters have been walking through my world.

So in the end, Krauss (if I attribute her character's observation to her) is right. Except for me, it happens in books, not in film.