No Full Stops.
Sunday, April 6, 2003
Two books on my bookshelf. The first, Juan The Landless, by Goytisolo, is interesting. I started reading it, and could not stop. The novel has no full stops (periods)!! He uses “:” as a period. I was unaware of this, and read on and on, and was thinking that this must be the longest sentence I ever read, and then I came to the end of the long paragraph, which had no full stop at the end. Like this
The first sentence is worth noting here…
according to Hindustani gurus, in the superior phase of meditation, the human body, purged of its appetites and desires, abandons itself with delight to an ethereal existence, freed from passions and vices, attentive only to the gentle flow of time without end, as light-winged as those soaring little birds of passage seemingly obeying only the soft and melodious inspiration of an invisible breeze and musically absorbed in remote contemplation of the sea: sensory stimuli and sesual excitations no longer have any effect on it, and immersed in the beneficient langour of an eternal present, it loftily disdains the absurd slavery of lustful pleasures, pure, svelte, airy, weightless, with the delicate fluidity of those clouds which at eventide enhance the majesty of autumnal landscapes, far from the world’s feverish, frantic hustle and bustle: rising above the tyranny of petty contingency and hence offering to the devout admiration of the vulgar the solemn and tranquil demeanor of the asceticpurified by his penitence and fasts,….
Once you start reading, the prose is a like a fast moving stream, which does not let you stop reading. I wanted to type just one sentence, but I typed two and a half sentences, but, are they two and half sentences? do the “:”s really act like full stops. They dont. The lack of full stops just means that you feel angry at him for having pulled a nasty trick on you, and yet you are thankful he did. It is a wonderful book, wish I had more time to spend on reading it. I found mention of the fact that he is one of the best living spanish authors. I think he could as well be one of the best authors in any of the popular languages.
The second book, The Master and Margarita, by Mikhael Bulgakov, is engrossing. Its a novel too, and I need to read some more to say abything about it. The beginning is quite descriptive in nature, and much like any other russian novel I have read. I love Russia as depicted in the novels.
Filed by Carthik at 6:52 pm under Livejournal