By: Pete Donohue

Pete Donohue — Mon, 03 Jun 2019 19:59:42 +0000

Thank you for your comment Henry, and the witty way you present it. I agree that is an exceptionally long sentence containing a range of facts and observations that for many readers will have become a blur by the time they get to the full stop. Tim Barton is a valued HIP Literature reviewer and has been since we began over five years ago. He does possess, as you say, an “erudite, well-stocked mind” and sometimes his writing style can seem almost ‘stream of consciousness’. In hindsight, I could have broken the offending sentence down into more manageable chunks and will take the hit for a little lazy or hurried sub-editing. Please keep reading HIP and commenting when minded to. Readers’ feedback always helps us to continually improve this community-run local newspaper.
Pete Donohue – HIP Literature editor

By: Henry James

Henry James — Mon, 03 Jun 2019 13:01:34 +0000

RE Bookbuster Review, paragraph 4, Lopez … offence.
Let me say straightaway that as an admirer of fluent, sophisticated prose I do of course find joy, elegance and sometimes even the frisson of a challenge in reading such material which arises no doubt from the certain knowledge that one is in the company of an erudite, well-stocked mind, marshalling the necessary facts and observations – necessary, please note, never more than necessary – all showing the precise relationships between idea, action, judgement, reflection, estimation and so on, even should this magisterial activity result in something approaching a well-merited entry inthe Guinness Book of Records in the way of extensive prose, referred to, often, though frequently erroneously, as a single sentence, and evidenced (in a Google search) in the works of F Scott Fitzgerald in the Great Gatsby, though more definitely demonstrated by that lioness of modernist fiction Virginia Wolf, but yet I must aver that a length of around 105 words (depending on how one counts hyphenated examples) does seem to be taking joy and ecstasy in verbal and grammatical pyrotechnics to an extreme state, a state, maybe by some known as nirvana, but by others, perhaps less patient of temperament, possibly, as a state of plain bewilderment and confusion, which can only be intensified by the enigma of the precise grammatical connection between the final two words and the previous part of the sentence, which may yet induce cases of severe apoplexy.
I just thought I’d point this out in a sentence of 234 words.

Comments on: Bookbuster Book Review

By: Pete Donohue

By: Henry James