One Sentence Novels

Message Bookmarked

Bookmark Removed

I'm reviewing a new 50,000-word novel in the form of one sentence: Dies: A Sentence by Vanessa Place (Les Figues, Los Angeles).

Anybody know of examples of novels or chapters consisting of marathon-length sentences? Other than the end of Ulysses (about 24,000 words, with a period about halfway through) and a chunk of The Book of Lazarus by Richard Grossman (about 28,000), I think Beckett must have done something, but can't remember.

― Kenny G (kennyg), Wednesday, 10 August 2005 21:19 (twenty years ago)

Proust to thread

― Cathy (Cathy), Wednesday, 10 August 2005 21:21 (twenty years ago)

Rick Moody's "Purple America" has a very long opening sentence if i remember correctly.

― jed_ (jed), Wednesday, 10 August 2005 21:22 (twenty years ago)

There's the Barthelme short story "senence" which is just that. Also, erickson's "our ecstatic days" has a sentence running through the middle of the text for the whole latter half of the book i'm led to believe, tho i haven't read the book yet.

also there's the general literary experimentalism of the Walter Abish crowd and the whole "gimmick novel" thing. i can't name the other authors offhand -- but the whole Ourvior de Litterature Potentielle group.

barth had his famous little endless sentence mobious strip gag.

also i'm sure some federman.

the barthelme is a REALLY GOOD STORY as well.

― Secundus Covarient (s_clover), Wednesday, 10 August 2005 22:14 (twenty years ago)

There's a 33 page sentence in Jonathan Coe's The Rotters' Club though in some ways it's a bit of a cheat to call it a sentence - it's really lots of sentences but it just has no full stops in it.

― Alba (Alba), Wednesday, 10 August 2005 22:17 (twenty years ago)

Well I've written a 30,000 word one-sentence piece called "Keep Walking" which was released as an audio CD (read by a cold and calculating computer) here: http://www.sadpenguin.com/keepwalking.html and I'm working on another one that will hopefully be even longer and more complex (I'm aiming for about 100,000 words with this one). But they're not at all "novels", more like "performance poems".

For some reason I think Beckett did something as well although I doubt it reached in the tens of thousands of words. Malloy's two chapters are each, as I recall, one paragraph, but that's different.

I can't think of anything written by any of the other likely suspects (don't recall any oulipo writers doing it, for instance), either.

But surely someone has done something.

― Casuistry (Chris P), Wednesday, 10 August 2005 22:18 (twenty years ago)

The Longest Sentence In Literature

― Alba (Alba), Wednesday, 10 August 2005 22:18 (twenty years ago)

The Bear in Faulkner's Go Down, Moses has a pretty long sentence. Or maybe it only seems long. I remembering it being more than a few pages, but it might pale next to any of the 50,000 word ones.

― Remy (x Jeremy), Wednesday, 10 August 2005 22:19 (twenty years ago)

That was an xpost.

Federman seems very likely, although none of the books I've read have that form.

Beckett, now that I think of it, was more likely to do the opposite: Write a relatively normal length sentence and call it a novel.

― Casuistry (Chris P), Wednesday, 10 August 2005 22:20 (twenty years ago)

goddamn library doesnt have that hrabal novel. looks like im gonna have to actually BUY something.

― Fetchboy (Felcher), Wednesday, 10 August 2005 22:25 (twenty years ago)

I love Hrabal. Let me know if it's any good.

― M. White (Miguelito), Wednesday, 10 August 2005 22:53 (twenty years ago)

What Hrabal book?

― Ian Riese-Moraine: a casualty of social estrangement. (Eastern Mantra), Thursday, 11 August 2005 00:09 (twenty years ago)

Oh, I see -- Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age. I'll have to find that. I'm interested in reading more of his works considering how much I love Closely Watched Trains.

― Ian Riese-Moraine: a casualty of social estrangement. (Eastern Mantra), Thursday, 11 August 2005 00:11 (twenty years ago)

that really is a good title

― Matt (Matt), Thursday, 11 August 2005 00:17 (twenty years ago)

Thanks for all the responses!

Alba, your post reminded me of the World's Longest Collaborative Sentence:

http://ca80.lehman.cuny.edu/davis/Sentence/sentence1.html

― Kenny G (kennyg), Thursday, 11 August 2005 01:18 (twenty years ago)

pretty sure "The Lost Scrapbook" by Evan Dara is an entire novel w/out a single period (or maybe there's one at the very end, can't remember), but it's 480 pages or something.

― Jimmy_tango, Thursday, 11 August 2005 01:33 (twenty years ago)

I browsed through federman's Take It Or Leave It (the only one I own, and which I heart dearly) and it sure 'nuff has some one sentence "chapters" but only of a few pages each.

pynchon, of course, is notorious for some awful long ones as well. also not an actual "sentence" but maybe some of gaddis' stream-of-consciousness rambles in say JR or Frolic... also count?

― Secundus Covarient (s_clover), Thursday, 11 August 2005 01:44 (twenty years ago)

sentences are not defined by having periods at their ends. discuss

― Josh (Josh), Thursday, 11 August 2005 03:50 (twenty years ago)

Sentences have a subject and a predicate.

Thank you.

― Orbit (Orbit), Thursday, 11 August 2005 03:51 (twenty years ago)

Sentences are not actually properly defined at all. Sentences do not always have a subject and a predicate. "Fuck you!" is a sentence but it does not have a subject. (N.B. That choice of sentence was not in any way meant as an insult, it's just the clearest example.)

― Casuistry (Chris P), Thursday, 11 August 2005 16:23 (twenty years ago)

I vaguely recall William Faulkner being quite the Johnny McRunonsentence, but it's been years.

― nickalicious (nickalicious), Thursday, 11 August 2005 16:30 (twenty years ago)

Beckett's "The Unnamable" - it's not one sentence but the last 30 or so pages are (I think). I can't remember if "How It Is" has any punctuation at all.

― Vicious Cop Kills Gentle Fool (Dada), Thursday, 11 August 2005 16:50 (twenty years ago)

Most ultra-long sentences are, yes, heavily dependent on lists, or else heavily dependent upon lulling the reader into a rhythm that allows whole new sentence-thoughts to be appended, using colons or semi-colons that the reader reads more or less as a period: I tell you one thing; I tell you another; I tell you a third thing; you know by now you don't have to remember the first thing; you know very well that this sentence is becoming unlikely -- ever more unlikely -- to refer back to a verb we've long ago moved passed, or close up a hanging thought from several lines back; you know I can use parallel structure to guide you through, in case I let one section drag on a bit and need to remind you what path we were following; it's just basically not that hard to keep extending a sentence, insofar as a good writer tends to know how one clause links to the next anyway, and if said writer is a good punctuator to boot it's not such a massive or even constrictive task to hinge everything together moving forward -- the constrictive part, of course, is that over a long narrative course one can't skip time, or insert dramatic breaks, and so on, and so one has to fill in all gaps and move onward, onward, steadily, connected, onward.

― nabisco (nabisco), Thursday, 11 August 2005 17:01 (twenty years ago)

You must be logged in to post. Please either login here, or if you are not registered, you may register here.