Saturday, January 08, 2011

Son of Weekend Disambiguation

There's a letter from Bernard F. Dick in the NYTBR, in response to my "One Sentence Says It All" essay. It begins:

Latin scholars, that imperiled species, are not intimidated by the long, sprawling sentence. The periodic sentence is a staple of Latin prose. Phrases and clauses balance one another as each unit generates its own rhythm, until they coalesce in a unity that is all the more remarkable in its fusion of details that would otherwise have been rendered separately, like pieces unable to interlock because no one took the time to connect them.

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There's also a review of Mathias Énard's one-long-sentence-sort-of novel Zone, which I mentioned in my piece.

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What else? Vanessa Place was kind enough to send a copy of her novel Dies: A Sentence, elegantly published by Les Figues. Brian Evenson, who wrote the introduction for the translation of Zone, blurbs Dies:

In a single sentence as bloody and crazed as the history of the 20th century, Place offers up “the untamed cadence of ten thousand feet.” Caught somewhere between Beckett’s The Unnamable, Kathy Acker’s Don Quixote, James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and Ann Quin’s Passages, Dies is an extravagant and ferocious book, a real and uncompromising marvel.

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