Our unpaid governess and housekeeper was my mother’s eldest sister Sybil, who had been married and neglected by a cousin of my father’s, who she had been in love with, and he had had taken advantage of the fact one rainy day and forgotten it by the time the weather cleared, so she tried to make me a better widower than he had been, giving me very rigid rules, but despite them I was extremely fond of her, with her pink-rimmed azure eyes and waxen complexion and poetry and poetic superstitions, which turned out to be true when she predicted that she would die soon after my sixteenth birthday, which is when she indeed did die.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Lolita
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Well, that's a terrific cumulative sentence and very different from what VN would write, I think. Because it goes on, it communicates a voice that is more spontaneous and more involved than VN's calculted, self-conscious voice. I think what you say about Robert Bolano is also true of Bellow: like VN, he uses a variety of style and voices. Unlike VN, he uses them for a pure storytelling purpose, to make the artifice of the story work, rather than disrupting it. The beginning of "2666" shows Bolano's style, like VN's, to be basically hypotactic:
ReplyDeleteThe first time that Jean-Claude Pelletier read Benno von Archimboldi was Christmas 1980, in Paris, when he was nineteen years old and studying German literature. The book in question was D’Arsonval. The young Pelletier didn’t realize at the time that the novel was part of a trilogy (made up of the English-themed The Garden and the Polish-themed The Leather Mask, together with the clearly French-themed D’Arsonval), but this ignorance or lapse or bibliographical lacuna, attributable only to his extreme youth, did nothing to diminish the wonder and admiration that the novel stirred in him.
This creates a sensible or thoughtful tone, I think: but it changes later at times. Perhaps it's not quite as complex as either VN or Bellow. I like your "noun" and "verb" examples - very inventive.