Sentenced: February 9th, 2014
A new feature on this here bloggy do! Each Sunday, Luke and I will post our “favorite” sentence (or group thereof) of the week from whatever it is we happen to be reading and tell you why we love it so. Inspiration for us, perhaps inspiration for you, and maybe, in the end, new tools in the arsenal for all.
Shiri is Sentenced by: pg 233, sentences 26-29 of Roddy Doyle’s The Guts:
“He got down to the emails. He watched them pour in. 97 became 167, became 298, became 407… He’d wait until they’d all arrived before he’d start to delete them.”
The context: Jimmy Rabbitte (who some of you may know from The Commitments and the other entries in The Barrytown Trilogy), is returning to work after a long cancer-treatment related absence. Much has happened in the interim, but he has only hazy memories of said events due to chemo-related memory loss/dementia, despite several of them being pivotal to his life and the lives of those around him.
The why: Such a succinct and painfully beautiful way to tell the reader a character has completely given up. Much of what is in the inbox, just as much of what is in life, is a load of meaningless spam, white noise, but a man who still has hope roots through the muck to find one or two or ten important emails, just as he would wade through the difficult, depressing, hopeless, and horrifying moments of existence to live the few that are wonderful and joyous and full of light. So few words, such mundane images, for such a massive and soul-shaking concept. Doyle has an ability to do with a minimum of fuss and flourish what many authors would spend paragraphs, if not pages, expounding upon, bemoaning, dissecting, lamenting. And his prose continues to be all the more powerful for it. This small group of sentences stands as a reminder to this sometimes prone to wordiness author that some things are better left said with a scalpel than with an axe. Or a broadsword. Or a mace. Pretty much any medieval weapon that causes splatter. I can only hope to one day reach this level of precision. Even the trying it is going to take a lot of work. And browbeating. Tearing of hair. Wailing. But that’s why we read, isn’t it? And that’s why we write. The trying. The weeding through the emails for the one that might be important. The one we need. The one that needs us.
Recent Comments