There was nothing left, just a crater smoking in the faint moonlight, and the feeling of having been at the origin of this infinitely small disaster.The unraveling of a relationship.... an 'infinitely small disaster' indeed! But one that leaves you nauseated and empty.
A page before...this monster sentence:
Marie was there. It was not, properly speaking, a hallucination, because the scene took place outside of any visual representation, in a purely mental register, in a fleeting flash of consciousness, as if I were witnessing the scene all at once without developing any of its potential components (a lightning-swift arm, a figure fleeing and falling to the ground, awful smells of fumes and burning flesh, cries, and the sound of headlong flight across the parquet floor of the museum), a scene that remained in a way imprisoned in the matrix of indeterminancy of the infinite possibilities if art and life, but that, from simple eventuality - even in its worst form - could become a reality from one moment to the next. Marie, I said in a low voice, Marie. I was shaking slightly. I was afraid. I took a step foward. No one was there.However, at 120 words, the above long sentence pales into insignificance before this one, earlier in the book!
We had continued on our way, still without speaking, and we hadn't yet left the bridge when - turning towards Marie, who was walking silently beside me in that icy drizzle of melted snow falling on the city, as I was getting ready to make a gesture toward her, to touch her arm or take her hand - I felt as though my head were wobbling, and dovetailing with this vertigo, the rumbling of an invisible train began to make everything tremble at its passage by noisily shaking the metal latticework of the bridge parapet that began to quiver from top to bottom next to me in the sprays of bluish sparks and flashes of fire I saw spurting suddenly from a switch box below that imploded on the spot in thick black smoke that began to boil up from the tracks where a train going full-tilt slammed on the brakes trying to stop, while, in the quick look around I took behind me on the footbridge amid the swaying lampposts, I saw passersby pitching as if on the bridge of a boat heaved up by an enormous wave, brief and violent, some of them losing their balance and struggling to stay on course by accelerating as though they were hurrying in pursuit of their umbrellas, others crouching down, most of them halting right where they were, seemingly petrified, paralyzed, shielding their hands with an arm, a briefcase, an attache case. And that was all, that was absolutely all. That was all there was. Barely thirty seconds, one minute later - after a moment fraught with panic and waiting when nothing else happened and nobody moved, everyone was looking at everyone else, still crouching among the briefcases lying here and there on the ground, still livid, damp with snow, ready to hunker down and protect themselves some more, expecting the worse, an immediate aftershock, perhaps a much stronger one (it was the second earthquake in a few hours, and it could start up again at any second, the threat was now a permanent one) -- people gradually stood up and walked away, the crowd on the footbridge disappeared, while an invisible dog barked far away in the grayish dawn.Must be a record of sorts at 241 words! It is a art to write such long sentences with the right grammar and without losing the reader - even the diligent one - but this one, perhaps lost in translation, did seem to falter on both counts.What was being said got lost to me somewhere along the way and I did not enjoy it as much as I usually do great long sentences in say, Ian McEwan novels.
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