"… the short sentence is artificial – we use almost never short sentences, we make pause, or we hold on a part of a sentence end …" he reaches for it with his left hand as it passes "… but this characteristic, very classical, short sentence – at the end with a dot – this is artificial, this is only a custom, this is perhaps helpful for the reader, but for only one reason, that the readers in the last few thousand years have learned that a short sentence is easier to understand, this is also a custom, but if you think, you almost never use short sentences, if you listen …" Slowly, patiently, with unstoppable momentum, he explains in his ramshackle English that the full stop is all very well for other writers, but it is not for him. He's discussing his disenchantment with the paragraph break and the full stop, expounding why the prose of his novels surges across the page in what his translator George Szirtes calls a "slow lava flow of narrative, a vast black river of type". The Hungarian writer is sitting in the armchair by the window, the morning after bewitching an Edinburgh festival audience with an electrifying reading from his novel Sátántango. P erched on the end of the bed in László Krasznahorkai's hotel room, I realise that I'm in the clutches of a formal dilemma.
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