Style

A quick link-dump, by way of catch up.

1.  You should read Lord Jim , Conrad's extraordinary 1925 novel. It is in the library, but is also available for free download from a number of sites (see here).  One thing I recommend, if you don't feel like actually reading it: go to LibriVox, the site stuffed with free downloads of audio books -- they're free becuase they're all read by amateurs, but they are unabridged and did I mention free? and some of them are very good.  You could put Lord Jim onto your phone or iPod, and listen to it when you're doing the ironing, or out walking.  This also works for other classics of world literature you haven't yet quite got around to reading: Tolstoy, Dickens, Austen. Browse the site and see for yourself. Then you can amaze your friends with the range and breadth of your literary knowledge.

2.  The passages we looked at today were from: Jerry Pournelle's High Justice (1977) [not Larry Niven: my mistake]; John Updike's story 'Playing With Dynamite', which you'll find in Updike's The Afterlife and Other Stories (1994) [apparently you can pick this collection up for 1p on amazon, if you don't mind a used copy]; and Don DeLillo, White Noise (1985).  Of this latter, Frank Lentricchia said 'The novel's is characterized by a heterogeneity that utilizes montages of tones, styles, and voices that have the effect of yoking together terror and wild humor as the essential tone of contemporary America.'

3. We talked, briefly, about Proust.  Here's the opening of Swann's Way, the first of the In Search of Lost Time books:

For a long time I used to go to bed early. Sometimes, when I had put out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say “I’m going to sleep.” And half an hour later the thought that it was time to go to sleep would awaken me; I would try to put away the book which, I imagined, was still in my hands, and to blow out the light; I had been thinking all the time, while I was asleep, of what I had just been reading, but my thoughts had run into a channel of their own, until I myself seemed actually to have become the subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles V. This impression would persist for some moments after I was awake; it did not disturb my mind, but it lay like scales upon my eyes and prevented them from registering the fact that the candle was no longer burning. Then it would begin to seem unintelligible, as the thoughts of a former existence must be to a reincarnate spirit; the subject of my book would separate itself from me, leaving me free to choose whether I would form part of it or no; and at the same time my sight would return and I would be astonished to find myself in a state of darkness, pleasant and restful enough for the eyes, and even more, perhaps, for my mind, to which it appeared incomprehensible, without a cause, a matter dark indeed.

I would ask myself what o’clock it could be; I could hear the whistling of trains, which, now nearer and now farther off, punctuating the distance like the note of a bird in a forest, shewed me in perspective the deserted countryside through which a traveller would be hurrying towards the nearest station: the path that he followed being fixed for ever in his memory by the general excitement due to being in a strange place, to doing unusual things, to the last words of conversation, to farewells exchanged beneath an unfamiliar lamp which echoed still in his ears amid the silence of the night; and to the delightful prospect of being once again at home.

You can read more here.

4. Here's a Guardian article on the writer Lydia Davis, who writes one-sentence stories, of which she says (amongst other things): 'my style is a reaction to Proust's long sentences.'

5. One more thing: you are all free to comment on this blog, in any way you like (so long as you're courteous), and to post anything you think useful or relevant to writing -- that's partly what it's for. Though it's also for you to put up your book reviews; which you also need to do.