So good! I love the alliteration "dangles deathlike" and the personification, "as if fasting" echoes the "vacant and weathered." There is little left of love. Fate enters and it too is personified. The adverb "tightly" does so much work to set up what it does to things--"halting all of time and life and feeling." Nice polysyndeton, drawing attention to each of these elements.!
Delighted to have sentence from my book, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, analyzed so thoughtfully! You just taught me a lot about what I wrote. :) Elisabeth
I spent months and months working on many of my sentences. Even now I can still remember the adventures some of my sentences took me on as I tried to figure out just where they were taking me (including the one you analyzed). Your substack makes all that time and effort feel so appreciated. Thank you for that. ~Elisabeth
Thank you for taking months and months to create such musical and varied sentences! And for your astonishing research about snails. I now look at snails with awe. Nina
From your book, I have new admiration and awe for the snail! Fascinating to learn that researchers are studying the snail's slime to develop a small robot that can travel snail-like through the human intestines!
I came to the comments to say that I recommend The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating in almost every book conversation I have. It's one of my all-time favorite reads, and beautiful from the first word to the last. Thank you, Elisabeth. Your book always has a treasured spot on our shelves... unless we've recently given away yet another copy. :)
The story, "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” is one of my favourite short stories (though, I have many). And word hippo is always an open tab on work and home computers. Love this beautiful sentence too and will get to practice later this week
Marquez's story moves you into magical realism from the very beginning. There's such a wonderful balance of humor, social commentary, and opaqueness, leaving it open to many interpretations.
Hi! A friend just recommended your newsletter and I'm really excited to be learning from your examples and insights.
I did have a comment though. You wrote: "Asyndeton, the deliberate omission of conjunctions (there is no "and" with the final phrase, "no trace at all), CREATES A FEELING OF SPEED, as if time is gobbling everything up rapidly."
In terms of literally reading the sentence, I feel we read the sentence slower, particularly because of the emphatic "no" AND the insertion of the commas. Inserting the "ands" would actually speed up the literal reading of the sentence, IMHO.
In terms of CONTENT, I'm not sure if "speed," per se would be the correct word, although I understand the point that there has been "a passage of time" that has gobbled up everything, and when linked with the word "starving," we can derive a more hurried "speed" for that action to take place. But I felt less linked to the word "speed" and more linked to the word "expansiveness," as in "time has swallowed everything so extensively and expansively. I hope that makes sense. So yeah, I felt this spatial/locational quality more than I felt a temporal quality. Yet again, "starving" does imply a sort of haste, such that, for me, the speed element was actually captured there more so than in the latter part of the passage.
“Sorrow defined and lovingly released is transformed, as if sorrow itself longs to shed its sadness, and each whispered wail is a slow sloughing of pain — one tear closer to joy, one tear closer to love, one tear closer to salvation.”
Inspired once again by last week’s Didion sentence, I wanted to mirror within this sentence a concise emotional journey, a path from darkness to light.
Isn’t Word Hippo a revelation? 😃 I also recommend One Thesaurus, which lets you filter by a word’s first letter, syllable count, etc., perfect for when you’re mining words for alliteration or rhythmic value.
Word-hippoed my way into the following sentence:
Love, vacant and weathered, dangles deathlike, as if fasting, and fate itself is tightly stationed, halting all of time and life and feeling.
So good! I love the alliteration "dangles deathlike" and the personification, "as if fasting" echoes the "vacant and weathered." There is little left of love. Fate enters and it too is personified. The adverb "tightly" does so much work to set up what it does to things--"halting all of time and life and feeling." Nice polysyndeton, drawing attention to each of these elements.!
I like your sentence better than the Bailey sentence. How vacated love halts all of everything.
Delighted to have sentence from my book, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, analyzed so thoughtfully! You just taught me a lot about what I wrote. :) Elisabeth
I'm so glad! I'm reading slowly because there are so many sentences drenched in style. Thank you for this treasure of a book!
I spent months and months working on many of my sentences. Even now I can still remember the adventures some of my sentences took me on as I tried to figure out just where they were taking me (including the one you analyzed). Your substack makes all that time and effort feel so appreciated. Thank you for that. ~Elisabeth
Thank you for taking months and months to create such musical and varied sentences! And for your astonishing research about snails. I now look at snails with awe. Nina
Elisabeth,
From your book, I have new admiration and awe for the snail! Fascinating to learn that researchers are studying the snail's slime to develop a small robot that can travel snail-like through the human intestines!
I came to the comments to say that I recommend The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating in almost every book conversation I have. It's one of my all-time favorite reads, and beautiful from the first word to the last. Thank you, Elisabeth. Your book always has a treasured spot on our shelves... unless we've recently given away yet another copy. :)
The story, "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” is one of my favourite short stories (though, I have many). And word hippo is always an open tab on work and home computers. Love this beautiful sentence too and will get to practice later this week
Marquez's story moves you into magical realism from the very beginning. There's such a wonderful balance of humor, social commentary, and opaqueness, leaving it open to many interpretations.
Just discovered Word Hippo!
Hi! A friend just recommended your newsletter and I'm really excited to be learning from your examples and insights.
I did have a comment though. You wrote: "Asyndeton, the deliberate omission of conjunctions (there is no "and" with the final phrase, "no trace at all), CREATES A FEELING OF SPEED, as if time is gobbling everything up rapidly."
In terms of literally reading the sentence, I feel we read the sentence slower, particularly because of the emphatic "no" AND the insertion of the commas. Inserting the "ands" would actually speed up the literal reading of the sentence, IMHO.
In terms of CONTENT, I'm not sure if "speed," per se would be the correct word, although I understand the point that there has been "a passage of time" that has gobbled up everything, and when linked with the word "starving," we can derive a more hurried "speed" for that action to take place. But I felt less linked to the word "speed" and more linked to the word "expansiveness," as in "time has swallowed everything so extensively and expansively. I hope that makes sense. So yeah, I felt this spatial/locational quality more than I felt a temporal quality. Yet again, "starving" does imply a sort of haste, such that, for me, the speed element was actually captured there more so than in the latter part of the passage.
Fascinating! Thank you for posting an alternative experience to the sound of the sentence.
“Sorrow defined and lovingly released is transformed, as if sorrow itself longs to shed its sadness, and each whispered wail is a slow sloughing of pain — one tear closer to joy, one tear closer to love, one tear closer to salvation.”
Inspired once again by last week’s Didion sentence, I wanted to mirror within this sentence a concise emotional journey, a path from darkness to light.
Isn’t Word Hippo a revelation? 😃 I also recommend One Thesaurus, which lets you filter by a word’s first letter, syllable count, etc., perfect for when you’re mining words for alliteration or rhythmic value.