tl; dr

[dianeduane]

My nominee for this year’s Too Long: Don’t Read award…

This autumn, according to the newspaper Libération, 676 new books will be published [in France], 466 of them written in French, the rest long-awaited translations. According to François Reynaert in Le Nouvel Observateur, "The name alone is leaden - in the expression 'rentrée littéraire,' one hears especially 'rentrée.' It smells of the back of the classroom and the old eraser."

One novel, "Zone," by Mathias Enard, consists of one sentence running over 500 pages.

Pass.

 

 

Tags: books, France, vacation, rentree

Comments

[batyatoon]

*dry* Thank god for semicolons, right?

[ndgmtlcd.livejournal.com]

That, and lots and lots of "propositions subordonnées, propositions conjonctives, et propositions relatives." I hated French grammar, intensely.

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

500 page sentence...um, wow.

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

I wrote a 500 word sentence for a school essay once. (Got a good mark, too.)

500 pages is, I propose, rather different. Since one should never put a book down mid-sentence, I would suggest only attempting to read this one when on the throne.

[alitalf.livejournal.com]

I suppose that if you write something that ordinary people could read, understand, and enjoy, that would count as a failure?

Maybe it is intended as an antidote for the short combinations of words that start in a capital letter and end in a full stop, but are not, technically, sentences. Like this one.

[mbumby.livejournal.com]

Holy cats! And I thought Proust was difficult with his couple-hundred word sentences.