Sentenced to Death
The New York Times in praise of a book consisting of a single, unfinished sentence -- 117 pages long.Thirty-three pages into what appears to be an unbroken highway of text, the reader might well wonder if that’s a mission statement or an invitation. “Dancing Lessons” unfurls as a single, sometimes maddening sentence that ends after 117 pages without a period, giving the impression that the opinionated, randy old cobbler will go on jawing ad infinitum. But the gambit works. His exuberant ramblings gain a propulsion that would be lost if the comma splices were curbed, the phrases divided into sentences. And there’s something about that slab of wordage that carries the eye forward, promising an intensity simply unattainable by your regularly punctuated novel.
They go on to talk about other single-sentence novels and related works.
Apparently, writing a good story in regularly formatted sentences and paragraphs is too blasé. Or perhaps it was simply the way "dead white males" did it, and thus should be pushed aside for postmodern eruptions of unstructured prose.
But I will tell you, their notion of "intensity" is not to my taste.
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They go on to talk about other single-sentence novels and related works.
Apparently, writing a good story in regularly formatted sentences and paragraphs is too blasé. Or perhaps it was simply the way "dead white males" did it, and thus should be pushed aside for postmodern eruptions of unstructured prose.
But I will tell you, their notion of "intensity" is not to my taste.
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