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I sorta regret writing that in retrospect because its a somewhat reply-bait thing to write. But I was thinking of Bohumil Hrabal as my most dear author. In so
by simonsarris 13y ago
I sorta regret writing that in retrospect because its a somewhat reply-bait thing to write.
But I was thinking of Bohumil Hrabal as my most dear author.
In some respects they are very different, in that Hrabal doesn't quite have the same magical realism bent. But in their writing itself, in their structure, they are often similar: Hrabal also favors extremely long sentences. Hrabal's book Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age is actually just one long run-on sentence that spans 160 pages. Even when Hrabal's sentences are not long, his paragraph breaks are few. It drives some people mad, but I think if you can follow along, it is an immense pleasure to read.
Both of them adore language:
> "Because when I read, I don't really read; I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop, or sip it like a liqueur until the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing brain and heart and coursing through the veins to the root of each blood vessel."
An example of those beautiful sentences: https://gist.github.com/simonsarris/11014861 https://gist.github.com/simonsarris/11014861 (made a gist so I stop polluting comment-space so much)
That's from Too Loud a Solitude by Hrabal, a short book, probably the most beautiful pamphlet I have ever read.
- igravious 13y agoThoughtful response. An unknown to me. Thanks. Will start digging.
- dfc 13y agoIt is so strange that people can have such varied responses to language. By the time my eyes alighted on the period/full-stop after "kilo" I was experiencing a significant amount of anxiety. Which is not to say that I did not enjoy the prose, because once I reached the period I did enjoy the writing. But I do not know if I could enjoy reading a book that contained a lot of marathon sentences.
- wfn 13y agoAny particular recommendations what to read for someone unfamiliar with Bohumil Hrabal? I just realized I've seen a film based on one of his novels of the same title, 'Closely Watched Trains' (a great film, by the way.) Interested in any suggestions whatsoever.
- bashinator 13y agoSpeed reading has recently been a thing here on HN, and I think these passages beautifully illustrate the shortcomings of those techniques. I've always been a very fast reader, and it was quite difficult for me to figure out how to appreciate this kind of literature. I can easily absorb information from man pages, and get a lot of enjoyment out of more intellectual fiction like what Charlie Stross or Alastair Reynolds write, but it's a whole different skill-set to read and enjoy writing like this. Marquez' style really requires you to turn off large parts of your information-processing brain, and just listen to the narration like it was someone else reading a story to you.