Sentences, Challenged Readers

A post draft from almost a month ago (2/11) that I am only now getting around to posting.

 The Long Breath of the World; On László Krasznahorkai’s sentences and what they require of us.by Nyuol Lueth Tong (LARB)

 In a Yale Review interview published early last year, Hari Kunzru recalled Krasznahorkai’s mischievous claim that the full stop “belongs to God,” a remark that can sound like a throwaway bit of literary theology until one recognizes the seriousness tucked inside it: the recognition that experience—especially experience distilled from courage, sorrow, or prolonged witness—does not arrive in neat verbal parcels. The flow of his syntax, Kunzru argues, conveys a “profound humanism,” though not the jagged interiority of canonical stream of consciousness. It is, rather than introspection, a widening orbit around perception—curiosity unbound.

Our misunderstanding of him, such as it is, reflects a broader anxiety that treats reading as an athletic contest of instant comprehension. We prize the quick “take”—we want to “get it”—and turn aggrieved when a text refuses to conform. Krasznahorkai, with the amused obstinacy that marks his best work, doesn’t write against this clock so much as beneath its notice. His art replaces velocity with attention. One follows his sentences as one watches weather: fronts forming at the horizon, pressure accumulating by degrees, fluctuations that announce, in aggregate, the approach of something unavoidable.

 When I was younger, I was told to clip my sentences. What I was trying to do was to capture everything. Reading the above tells me there is a way to do what I tried to do back then. Now, it is my grammar checker telling me not to write a sentence of more than 40 words.

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