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Long Sentences
AC at Slightly Bluestocking asks a good question.
Long sentences. Correction opens with a sentence that’s about two pages long. Most of the sentences (not all) are very long, and there are no paragraph breaks. You’d think this would be frustrating, but it actually works very well — pulls you on and on, and before you’ve realized it, several pages have gone by. . . .
On the other hand, a few months ago I read Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch for English class. Likewise, Garcia Marquez uses extremely long sentences (much more so than Bernhard, at least thusfar). The longest goes on for about fifty pages. (Someone told me that there are something like 22 sentences in the entire 250 page book, which is probably an underestimate, but it gives you an idea of what it’s like). I found Autumn excruciating. There, the conceit felt forced, almost gimmicky.
So why the difference? Why does Correction strike me as beautiful, lucid, etc, while I couldn’t stand Autumn? I’m not sure, but maybe it has something to do with the fact that there’s no obvious ‘agenda’ with Bernhard. That could be why I found Autumn gimmicky, because the prose seemed merely functional.
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Recommended Books DeLillo's major work before White Noise is probably his most underrated novel. Its all right here--the politics of paranoia, terrorism, the unnamable--set in an evocative, timeless Greece.
The most bizarre Abe novel I've yet read, which is indeed saying something. About a subclass of Japanese men who go around wearing boxes from the waist up (and then use them as domiciles in the evening), the book is also an experiment in perspective shifts, a highly unstable, metafictional first-person narrative, and an exploration of voyeurism, consumerism, and aberrant sexuality.
Charting the path to three gunshots--the one that killed filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, the one that disabled his Islamic extremist assassin, Mohammed Bouyeri, and the one that led to Vincent Van Gogh’s one hundred years earlier--Olsen tells three separate stories that resonate with one another on numerous levels: the logic of extremism, the role of the dissident in Dutch society, the limits of tolerance, the purpose of the artist, the feeling of the most important five minutes of your life. Read my interview with the author.
Creatively structured, well-executed epic novel of rural South Africa from 1950 - 2000. Takes on a lot and lives up to it magnificently. Highly recommended.
A book that's an interview about the book you're supposedly holding in your hands. Creative, potent, and full of life. Just what metafiction should be. Read my post on it.
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The Novels of Kim Young-ha
Graphs, Maps, Trees
The Names by Don DeLillo (1982)
The Box Man by Kobo Abe (1973, English 1974)
Head in Flames by Lance Olsen (2009)
Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk (2006, English 2010)
The Weather Fifteen Years Ago by Wolf Haas (2006, English 2009)
A long time ago I read all of GGM’s work in a row, Autumn of the Patriarch was the one I couldn’t get through, I found myself more interested in looking for the next period than actually reading the book.
Thanks for the mention! Very exciting for me, as I haven’t been blogging long. Although now that I look at that post, I feel like such a blowhard….