Marie-Claire Blais

Marie-Claire Blais was a Canadian author who by all accounts should have been more widely read—but wasn't. She wrote in French, being a native of Quebec, so her works had to be translated. Some were, most weren't. Canadian critics raved about her, others not so much. And though I never heard of her, I was intrigued enough to read about her in yesterday's NYT obituary by Clay Risen.

The out quote caught my eye: "Astonishingly long sentences were a hallmark of a novelist's work."

How long? Longer than the 116 words I once counted in a sentence written by Robert Caro in The New Yorker, full of clauses, phrases, semi-colons and em dashes? I scanned the obit for a quick look-see if any examples of "an astonishing long sentence" were offered. Something set off by italics, like poetry. Nope. Well, read on McDuff. And I did.

Turns out Ms. Blais once opened a novel with a first sentence that measured 55 pages! Even if double spaced, (which I doubt it was) that's going to weigh in at more than 116 words. Caro's a lightweight compared to this lady.

Mr Risen tells us: "She made astonishingly long sentences a hallmark of her work; the opening sentence of "Le Sourd Dans la Ville" (1979) published in English as "Deaf to the City," occupied 55 pages. Dialogue might appear without quotation marks. Within each sentence she might shift time and place and points of view, stranding readers unable to go with the flow of her sometimes hallucinatory prose."

I remember the early grammar school years when the teachers told us of the dangers of "run-on" sentences. I think I learned to diagram sentences in 6th grade, and I did love it.  I still get a kick of a sentence like Caro wrote, or an obituary lede by Bruce Weber that take flight and leave you gasping for air—but when looked at through the lens of diagramming, are not run-on sentences. Mrs. Katzman would be impressed.

Mentally, I've always somewhat diagrammed sentences like those of Caro, Weber, and anyone else who pushes the boundaries and wards off the dreaded period. I imagine the sentences elegantly diagrammed looking like a cantilevered  bridge, perhaps like the old Tappan Zee bridge across the Hudson. But a 55 page sentence would defy diagramming. I think even if it were, it would look more like a Frank Gehry building than anything attractive., even if you strung twinkling lights on it.

Fifty-five pages is more than a marathon, it is an ultra marathon. Jimmy Breslin would scoff at journalists who wrote long worded sentences as their way of showing off that they went to J-school, likely an Ivy League J-school at that.

Breslin of course didn't got to any J-school, but he still managed to win a Pulitzer for his reporting on the gravedigger's preparation for JFK's grave in Arlington Cemetery. The way I saw it, Breslin being Irish-American and growing up in Queens, land of more headstones than perhaps Arlington itself, was fully equipped to view JFK's passing completely different from other the reporters. Breslin could even discuss the merits of granite or marble headstones from an erosion point of view if they were to used anywhere near salt water, like near Rockaway.

The headline for Ms. Blais's obituary reads: Marie-Claire Blais, 82, Writer Who Captivated Canadian Readers, Dies.

Apparently, not even a 55-page one sentence overture could discourage those from reading her.

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