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6/12/06 21:46Few authors are amenable to being read very, very slowly. A writer has to be good on a very small scale, so that you can read a handful of sentences and still be able to get something out of it--but not such a stylist that you read and read and read and you just wonder when the story is going to show up.
But I started one of Tanizaki's short stories, and it was a slog to get through at first because the guy only uses periods every three sentences or so*, but I'm getting used to that and I think I quite like him. He's got a sense of humor.
*The verb form for ending a sentence is the same as the verb form for embedding a clause, so if you're not watching out for this you end up trying to interpret these sentences as really convoluted multiply embedded clauses, instead of a couple fairly simple sentences strung together sequentially.
Still working on Kafka on the Shore. Murakami should just stop writing about sex, please. Ah--it's not the way he writes about sex, but rather the way he writes about women, which is annoying in the background in a mostly subtle way, until the sex shows up. I find him worth reading even so, but, well, sometimes the twenty pages you have time for on your lunch hour are not the right twenty pages.
But I started one of Tanizaki's short stories, and it was a slog to get through at first because the guy only uses periods every three sentences or so*, but I'm getting used to that and I think I quite like him. He's got a sense of humor.
*The verb form for ending a sentence is the same as the verb form for embedding a clause, so if you're not watching out for this you end up trying to interpret these sentences as really convoluted multiply embedded clauses, instead of a couple fairly simple sentences strung together sequentially.
Still working on Kafka on the Shore. Murakami should just stop writing about sex, please. Ah--it's not the way he writes about sex, but rather the way he writes about women, which is annoying in the background in a mostly subtle way, until the sex shows up. I find him worth reading even so, but, well, sometimes the twenty pages you have time for on your lunch hour are not the right twenty pages.