This was an odd book in that there was a story, but I just couldn’t keep track of what was going on because the paragraphs wandered around so much – in wonderful ways, in that they were interesting and beautiful – and in frustrating ways because I kept losing track of where the story was going. It made it very hard to finish this book, and I was completely clueless of what had happened by the end of the story. Just a portion of the opening description of the wizard Prospero’s house illustrates this phenomenon perfectly:
“He lived in a huge, ridiculous doodad-covered, trash-filled two-story horror of a house that stumbled, staggered, and dribbled right up to the edge of a great shadowy forest of elms and oaks and maples. It was a house whose gutter spouts were worked into the shape of whistling sphinxes and screaming bearded faces; a house whose white wooden porch was decorated with carved bears, monkeys, toads, and fat women in togas holding sheaves of grain; a house whose steep gray-slate roof was capped with a glass-enclosed, twisty-copper-columned observatory…”
Important lessons here: the form of the cumulative sentence CAN be used to death. A sentence does more than simply describe things: it is part of the story.
“He lived in a huge, ridiculous doodad-covered, trash-filled two-story horror of a house that stumbled, staggered, and dribbled right up to the edge of a great shadowy forest of elms and oaks and maples. It was a house whose gutter spouts were worked into the shape of whistling sphinxes and screaming bearded faces; a house whose white wooden porch was decorated with carved bears, monkeys, toads, and fat women in togas holding sheaves of grain; a house whose steep gray-slate roof was capped with a glass-enclosed, twisty-copper-columned observatory…”
Important lessons here: the form of the cumulative sentence CAN be used to death. A sentence does more than simply describe things: it is part of the story.
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