Miscellanea

[undyingking]

• "It was only when he did not get up to take a bow that anyone realised something had gone wrong."
  This is the sort of story that if you put it in a murder mystery game, it would be dismissed as too absurd. Well done, Mr Hoevels, especially for coming back on the following night.

• "Another stage-property that he pulled out of his box pretty frequently

Comments

Mark Twain

[theoclarke]

I read The Deerslayer about ten years ago without noticing the logical inconsistencies that Mark Twain identifies so cogently. I did find the reported speech to be clumsy but I confess that I ascribed that to the style prevailing in that time and place. Twain's attack casts doubt on this although he was just six years old at the publication of Cooper's novel. Forty years and hundreds of miles may account for the difference of language but I imagine otherwise.

Re: Mark Twain

[undyingking]

We need an angry contemporary defender to set against Twain, I think.

My only Coopering was in starting Last of the Mohicans and giving up mired in the prose, which is quite unusual for me, but I put it down to evolving pains of US novelistic style.

Re: Mark Twain

[theoclarke]

I think that part of Cooper's huge appeal lay in the lack of competition at the time. In the early nineteenth century there had been few truly American novels: that is, books written by Americans in an American idiom about American subjects. By Twain's time there was a substantial corpus of such work and the bar was raised accordingly.

[verlaine]

Wow, Voynich is amazing. Real shiver-down-the-spine stuff.