For one of my courses (“Caribbean Literature”) I have to read The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon.
It’s not the worst thing I’ve had to read this semester by a long shot, but I just finished a sentence that, without exaggeration, lasted ten pages. One sentence, lots of commas and hyphens, but no periods or full-stop punctuation. It was sorta stream of consciousness, but mostly it was annoying.
Granted, Selvon was writing decades ago, and his specific style was to bring a sort of Caribbean patois to English literature, and boy howdy did he succeed there. The book itself has been mostly enjoyable (aside from some blatant sexism, but again, the book is just shy of a century old at this point and while not acceptable it isn’t surprising either), but this one sentence annoyed me. A lot.
It’s hard to read! It’s specifically anti-readability. It always strikes me as the author sticking their nose in the air and saying with a snooty attitude “Well good readers will understand!” A sort of “No True Scotsman” argument for writing or reading… if you don’t like it, you’re not a “real” reader. Like… oh, I dunno, post-modernist crap that wanders around without ever actually telling a story and that’s supposed to be the story. Although not that bad.
Anyway. Makes me appreciate that my particular stylistic difficulties (parenthetical asides and ellipses) don’t really impact readability that much. A bit, no question, and I have to be careful with them, but yeah. Long sentences. Selvon couldn’t pull ‘em off, and I ain’t gonna try!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!