The Doloriad - Question 6 - The Prose

kcaryths

I found the prose very difficult to get through at times, particularly in how the narrative perspective would shift seemingly out of nowhere. I had to look up a number of words and sentences would string together in long rambing trails at times. Did you enjoy this as a reader? Why do you think Wiliams did this as the author?

RichardAbbott

Yes, the prose style was a real turn-off for me. I really didn't like the long rambling sentences strung into long rambling paragraphs. And as you say, the viewpoint shifted often in unpredictable and largely unsignalled ways. It baffled me first that Williams would do this and subsequently that editors and publishers would run with it. For me, it made the work and what it might be trying to say even more opaque.

Apocryphal

The prose was the thing I liked the most. Not so much the long rambly quality of the paragraphs, but the actual way the words were strung together I found quite beautiful. I found that when I started reading, the pages would fairly fly by. But then I'd put it down and have a hard time picking it up again, because of it's density and bleakness.

This passage a good example of the prose I liked. Now, if I was assembling this, I'd break things up more - probably into 2 paragraphs, and the paragraph that start with 'But he was afraid' would be more than two sentences. But the words themselves would remain the same.:

Inside the sunny schoolroom, Franta was stalking one of Jan's beloved chickens, scuttling across the floor like a crab on his thin knobbly legs, his stiff arms extended out to his sides as if to catch some phantom breeze. He imagined what it would be like to eat one: pink flesh blackening, skin crackling, thrust into the fire - and the smell! - and saliva pooled in his mouth. But he was afraid of their older brother, who guarded his chickens jealously; the siblings felt his bleary pig eyes upon them wherever they went: they saw them in the peeling wood that lined the the windows of their mother's apartment block, or in the brown fronds of parched ferns, watching them as they scurried through the forest on one of the trips to forage supplies from the abandoned shopping centers, or as they worked in the field, his eyes studded into the hard, reproachful earth. And so as soon as he got close, Franta would dart away again, and the chicken clucked calmly as though the world were empty of threat, which, of course, it wasn't.

kcaryths

I felt the same way @Apocryphal. Normally this would lead me to DNF a book like this but I was somehow still strangely attracted to the way she wrote. The rambling prose was difficult but it also seemed to add to the chaotic and meandering world that the characters lived in.