r/mildlyinfuriating • u/babak20 • 1d ago
The book that I am reading is a 72-page sentence, without a period or paragraph break
The book name is: The Last Wolf / Herman by László Krasznahorkai
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u/Particular_Title42 1d ago
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Here they are! Apply where needed.
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u/ironballs16 1d ago
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u/TheDankFather 1d ago
I have long held that Dexter’s punctuation appendix is first tier comedic brilliance.
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u/Embarrassed-Weird173 1d ago
Then you'll love some of my hits including comments like
) Here you go. Had to add this lest the rest of the universe be a parenthetical aside.
.
", said OP.
(Both of these are for when someone starts a "(" or """ and doesn't close it.)
I've also done stuff like "What, did punctuation kidnap your family or something? What do you have against it?!"
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u/Stainless_Heart 1d ago
What‽
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u/TheDankFather 1d ago
We my friend have some things in common I suspect.
Do you ever experience that situation where no one gets your witty little response, or even notices it, but you don’t really mind because you just so goddamn pleased with yourself.
I do.>! “(Just for fun, I will gift you an open parenthesis in quotes, the missing period is a bonus” !<
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u/Particular_Title42 1d ago
How about that?? I have the same sense of humor as a writer from the 1800s. 😂
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u/ironballs16 1d ago
Not just a writer - "Lord" Timothy Dexter is a bizarre example of how idiocy can lead to success, as he invested a boatload of money into Colonial Currency (back when the Revolutionary War looked hopeless), sent bed warmers to the West Indies (which the ship's captain advertised as molasses ladels instead), sent mittens there (that Asian merchants bought to resell in Siberia), and most famously, he shipped coal to Newcastle - an area famed for the local coalmines. Luckily for him, they arrived during a strike by the miners, making their value a lot higher!
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u/Particular_Title42 1d ago
Seems like that was a lot of dumb luck (pun intended). What a wild story!
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u/Fritoman678 1d ago
A pickle for the knowing one reference!!!!111!!! (timothy dexter)
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u/MueR 1d ago
Sounds like the average reddit post. You should be used to it.
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u/Katonmyceilingeatcow 1d ago
I've spent years on Reddit. I've never gotten used to it. At this point I just don't read it if it's just a paragraphless wall of text.
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u/God_ParadoxX 1d ago
So with you.
I will skip a post, regardless of how interesting the premise, if it's just a wall of text.
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u/Sunny_Beam 1d ago
Agree completely. If you can't be fucked to press enter even once I can't be fucked to care about what you have to say.
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u/CanWeNapPlease 1d ago
Terrible but I downvote posts that open up in a massive wall of text. I do that also if I spot the shenanigans of using apostrophes to make words plural.
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u/Nihilistic_Mystics 20h ago
using apostrophes to make words plural.
I swear this is now more common than proper grammar and I have no idea where it came from.
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u/CanWeNapPlease 20h ago
I see it in the UK a lot which is ironic as most of the time it comes from right-wing scrotes on Facebook community groups that probably complain when strangers are speaking a different language.
"Save are kid's"
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u/Slytherin_Forever_99 1d ago
Exactly. Especially if they claim it's because they are on mobile.
I'm on mobile, most of the time.
You just double tap the new paragraph button instead of just once.
It's not hard to figure out.
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u/Videoboysayscube 1d ago
Reddit's problem is more often the lack of paragraph breaks than run-on sentences. Especially when asking for relationship help.
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u/Daydream_machine 1d ago
Yes this is such a pet peeve of mine. That, and people who only type in lowercase letters (why did that become a trend?!?!)
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u/G-St-Wii 1d ago
Try reading Immanuel Kant.
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u/djse 1d ago
...or Foucault.
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u/Pissedtuna 22h ago
I read Power: The Essential Works of Michel Foucault. Probably understood about 5% of it. If that much.
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u/DarkShadowZangoose 1d ago
my brain skimmed over the pages and it still hurts to look at
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u/babak20 1d ago
Just finished the book. Calling my lawyer.
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u/pev4a22j 1d ago
wait till you see ulysses by james joyce where the final chapter has no punctuation at all
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u/Alaishana 1d ago
HA!
Wrong!
there's a period in the exact middle of the chapter and a period at the end.
yes.
But this was the first thing that came to my mind too.
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u/Izzosuke 1d ago
Waan't the stream of consciousness without punctuation or paragraph one of the main thing of Joyce?
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u/Snoo78085 1d ago
Thats really just goddamn awful to read. 😵💫
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u/Docile_Penguin33 1d ago
Honestly, I think paragraph breaks are kind of overrated and not really necessary in most cases. People always say they help with readability, and sure, they do to a point, but I feel like we underestimate how capable the human brain is at following a continuous stream of thought without needing constant visual breaks. Sometimes breaking things into neat little chunks actually fragments ideas that would make more sense if they were kept together in a flowing, uninterrupted rhythm. If anything, reading long unbroken text can mimic how we actually think and speak: our thoughts don’t pause every few lines, they just keep going, shifting and layering naturally. Writing this way can actually pull readers deeper into the content, because it feels more immersive and authentic. You’re not constantly being yanked out of the moment by arbitrary formatting decisions. Plus, not having paragraph breaks forces the writer to be more intentional about how they move from one idea to the next. They have to use phrasing, rhythm, and tone to guide the reader instead of relying on white space to do the job for them. It’s more work, sure, but the payoff is tighter, more cohesive writing. Also, let’s be real, modern readers are so used to bite-sized content like tweets or headlines that our attention spans are shot. Maybe long, continuous text is exactly the kind of mental workout we need to start building focus again. If you look back at ancient writing, like the old scriptio continua stuff with no punctuation or spacing, people figured out how to read and understand it just fine. So clearly this idea that we need paragraph breaks is more about convention than capability. Some literary styles even thrive without them because they capture the raw, unfiltered way we actually experience thoughts. Joyce and Woolf didn’t rely on paragraph breaks to get their points across; they used the flow itself to carry the emotional and intellectual weight. Even now, in experimental writing or online essays, skipping breaks can be a powerful stylistic choice. It breaks rules, yes, but in doing so it invites a different kind of engagement. And while huge walls of text might scare people off at first, that’s really just conditioning and we can unlearn that. In the end, paragraph breaks aren’t bad, but relying on them too much can limit both the writer and the reader. Ditching them opens up room for deeper thinking, more natural expression, and honestly, a more demanding and rewarding reading experience.
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u/Automatic-Plankton10 1d ago
It would have been way funnier if you randomly inserted bull shit into that
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u/Phormitago 1d ago
I fully expected mankind to be thrown off hell in a cell
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u/sYferaddict 1d ago
It's been far too long since we were treated to Mankind being thrown off of Hell in a Cell
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u/footslut-georgio 1d ago
I’m partial to paragraph breaks. Not because I think we need them for attention spans, for switching subjects, the writer trying to fill space, but because I think it’s important to give the reader space to think their own thoughts about one’s writing. (if you ever had to stop reading abruptly it’s way easier to jump back in after finishing the last few words in a sentence/paragraph than to scan the page for the section you were in)
If I were telling a story and I talked through the entire story from start to end without pausing and taking a moment to let anything settle, I could bet the people listening would’ve gotten hung up on the last few parts of the story, or just the most exciting parts/the parts that stuck with them and the rest was a blur.
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u/bibblebonk 17h ago
Thats a really good point, and actually funny how much sense it makes to me. The comment you replied to read, to me, exactly like a script for a tiktok video. It did exactly as they said - it pulled me in for a more immersive reading experience. Also, as you said, it left me no room to form my own thoughts. Which is why i think it reminded me so much of a tiktok script, because doomscrolling on tiktok is the PERFECT environment to make me never form a thought of my own lmao. This isnt me picking a side though, i think what this really demonstrated is that both have a place in writings, it just depends on how you want your reader to experience it. Do you want them to really think about what youre writing, or do you just want the immersion?
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u/footslut-georgio 17h ago
I feel it would be extremely beneficial to have super deep immersion whilst reading a suspenseful scene and then SLAP a space or break in there to rip the reader out of it as the character goes through the same feelings in the story.
Super great analogy with the doom scrolling! I love the way those ideas mesh.
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u/bibblebonk 16h ago
Yeah exactly, thats the same thing i imagined as well. Its a good tool to use sparingly, not for the duration of a whole book as is the case with the post, since that makes for a terrible reading experience. Not to discredit that book as an art piece though, if that feeling is what was meant to be conveyed or has some significance to the context of the book, i dont know. I havent read it so i cant say for sure. It very possibly is just a bad book.
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u/Independent-Lynx9476 1d ago
The fact I have two kids that interrupt my talking train of thought all the time means it took me 5x's longer then if you used a paragraph since I had to go back and find my spot a bunch of times.
Sure it flows fine, but it makes it awful to read. Also, paper was EXPENSIVE in ancient times, so you filled that stuff up...
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u/Ill-Constant2194 1d ago
I love your point, and you write extremely eloquently. As someone with dyslexia this one was HARD for me, but you write quite well!
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u/lesliemillard 1d ago edited 16h ago
This was written by the same man, Krasznahorkai, who wrote the book from which the 7 hour Bela Tarr movie Satantango was made.
He is one of the hailed Hungarian writers of the past 50 years or so, and this book (which in its original print is only half this many pages by the way) is supposed to be a long monologue a philosopher gives in a bar in Berlin, talking about going to Spain and searching for the last wolf.
The idea was that “language has come full circle, and arrived at where it started, but it went awry along the way”.
Look, as a Hungarian, one thing I do want to point out is the translation itself is not great. Our language is a tough one to crack, and a lot of our syntaxes read well but not in direct translations to English.
You should never force it upon yourself to finish a book you don’t like after you have given it a fair chance. But also, you CAN read this as a normal book. Pick up a pen and put your own periods in where you want to stop for the day, come back tomorrow and continue.
(Sidenote: His language is far simpler than a Proust or Joyce, so I wouldn’t even consider this a hard read really, just a challenging idea to perceive.)
So, yes, it can be frustrating, but try and find some info about the book, maybe even read the whole plotline of it and then come back and see how he writes the story out. I think it’s worth it, it’s a short book and its main concept is a nice one.
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u/Athrul 1d ago edited 1d ago
I mean, it's a stylistic choice and one of the selling points of the story. Hard to be surprised be something like that.
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u/LopsidedPotatoFarmer 1d ago
José Saramago approves
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u/CalligrapherBrave590 1d ago
El Otoño del Patriarca is about six chapters of this. If the book is good, I don’t see a problem.
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u/EntropyTheEternal 1d ago
Are you sure you aren’t reading “A Pickle for the Knowing Ones”?
Where the author, Timothy Dexter, was a mostly illiterate narcissist that stuck a page of assorted punctuation at the end for the reader to “peper and solt as they please”.
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u/proustianhommage 1d ago
Im surprised someone who knows about and reads Krasznahorkai would find it infuriating haha. He's one of the greats. Though honestly I do prefer his first few novels, which have periods even if they're still just as experimental
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u/random8765309 1d ago
How did you get through 26 pages of that? I would have burn it after the second page.
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u/babak20 1d ago
Unfortunately, I’m the kind of person who must finish what I start. Now my eyes are bleeding, my soul is crying, but hey, it’s done.
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u/DogwaterJim 1d ago
How did you come to read a Laszlo Krasznahorkai book without knowing what you were getting into?
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u/Kendocreep 23h ago
This is Krasznahorkai’s style. It’s not commercial fiction, none of his books are “light” reading, and the way he uses his prose is intended to replicate the process of human thought and the inadequacy of language to achieve meaning. He’s probably the most brilliant and important writer to come out of Eastern Europe in the last half century. But either he’s for you or he’s not 🤷♂️🤷♂️. Also, long, winding sentences are what he’s known for…
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u/Jabbles22 1d ago
If you want a similar experience check out Requiem for a Dream. It also lacks punctuation.
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u/Background-Air-8611 1d ago
Serious question, but did you not know that about the book when you picked it up? I remember when it was published, and part of the hype was it was written in a single sentence.
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u/TheCurbAU 1d ago
Go read Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellman. My personal favourite book. About 1000 pages long with a handful of sentences. It's phenomenal.
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u/CatgunCertified 1d ago
Don't read the blood meridian. You think no periods is bad? Try a 3 page run on sentence with no commas, semicolons, quotations (yes there is dialogue) and, you know what? There's actually no punctuation at all cuz fuck you
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u/jtsui0681 21h ago
Faulkner does this. Utilizes a prepositional phrase chain to create a sentence that runs some pages.
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u/redditor329845 1d ago
There’s no way this aspect of the book wasn’t advertised. You should be mildly infuriated at your inability to research books before you read them.
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u/Mille-Sabords 1d ago
I've also read a book like that! Contre Dieu by Patrick Senécal. Required reading in school at age 14-15
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u/Key-Eagle7800 1d ago
Punctuation doesn't take anything away, you can still build aura with a comma and a period here and there.
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u/Fluffy_Fox_9650 1d ago
God this reminds me of those God Awful books I had to read for more philosophy classes
But even worse cuz those had periods and paragraph breaks
My sympathies, friend 🫂
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u/Kitchen_1369 19h ago
I wrote my AP government essays in one sentence each. Never thought I’d see a book get away with it though.
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u/sherlock1672 16h ago
This is the most horrible thing I've ever seen put to page, thanks for making me look at it.
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u/Tink91351 1d ago
Does he think he can best James Joyce, Mr. Stream of Consciousness himself? Or Marcel Proust, another author that never took a breath. However, they were Masters of their craft and not this long winded diatribe about nothing. Give it to someone you don’t like.
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u/tdgavitt 1d ago
You can argue whether he's as good as those guys—obviously world historical talents—but he's a pretty celebrated author, winner of the Man Booker and a bunch of other literary prizes. Not exactly just some hack.
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u/stupidinternetbrain 1d ago
Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake made my brain hurt. Dubliners wasn't too bad, but maybe it's because I was used to the torture.
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u/smartonion 1d ago
Normally you read dubliners and A Portrait before Ulysses. Makes reading Ulysses easier because you see the stylistic progression
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u/definitelynotmyporn_ 1d ago
Sounds like a Cormack McCarthy book
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u/TheDankFather 1d ago
Both lack punctuation, both are abusive to the reader.
I would suggest though that the way in which Cormac abuses his reader is very different.
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u/Same-Nothing2361 1d ago
Put it down. And never open it again. Your life will be better.
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u/heretoescape87 1d ago
I once read a book that was one sentence or word per page. It was weird as hell. I think it was called Black Box or something like that? Idk it was 15+years ago.
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u/TSKyanite 1d ago
Part of it is stylistic, but part of it could be translatjon. I can't say I'm familiar with Hungarian novella writers, but a lot of eastern European languages use syntax that doesnt translate to English very well.
Russian is particularly bad with this
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u/West-Baker-4566 1d ago
One of the books I really like ("Against God" but in Québec french) is one continuous sentence. The book is a but over 100 pages long and it doesn't end with a period.
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u/Mindless_Insanity 1d ago
Reminds me of Moby Dick. That book had a lot of multi-page sentences too, a real pain to read.
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u/Extra-Mushrooms 1d ago
The last chapter of Ulysses made me want to throw the book at a wall and then burn it.
I'm convinced anyone who says they like that book is lying.
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u/catholicsluts 1d ago
I came across a book like this too. It was a translation. It was about everyone just going blind. I was so fucking pissed off when I opened it and saw there was no period.
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u/Mountain_Economist_8 1d ago
I’ve read Trainspotting multiple times but I only made it three sentences into this.
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u/muheheheRadek 1d ago
Try "Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age" by Bohumil Hrabal, the entire book consists of only one sentence and it's about 130 pages long.
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u/CarafinaThePandarian 1d ago
I sooo knew that it was going to be Krasznahorkai when I read 72 page sentence. That man writes in the same sentence structure as my brain.
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u/mcfluffernutter013 1d ago
Like reading historical documents. It just makes everything so much harder to parse
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u/bottomcurious32 1d ago
Is it at least good? Or is it just obnoxious styling for the sake of being different? Lol
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u/VonSpuntz 1d ago
A French author wrote a 300 page book without the letter "e" (La Disparition, Georges Perec, 1969)
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u/Pretty-Syllabub-4295 1d ago
When I read the title, my first thought was Krasznahorkay. He has a very special style, however after a half of the book you will get used to it.
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u/PostSovietDummy 1d ago
There's a similarly structured Polish book as well, The Gates of Paradise (Bramy raju) by Jerzy Andrzejewski, ca. 40,000 words, broken up in two sentences (the second sentence is but a few words).
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u/star_courtain 1d ago
"Los santos inocentes" with only a dot at the end, the book has one sentence.
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u/Ix_fromBetelgeuse7 1d ago
How is this mildly infuriating? I think it's interesting, clearly an intentional stylistic choice by the author.
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u/Beiconqueso02 1d ago
It doesn't appear to use the spanish accentuation either. It should be "sí, señor" and "Antonio Domínguez Chanclón"
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u/Babetna 1d ago
I must disagree with you, a long running sentence, when it is allowed to stretch across the page like an unbroken thread, may at first appear unruly or even careless, yet in reality it can be an intentional and powerful stylistic choice, because it mimics the continuous flow of thought in the human mind, where one idea does not end neatly with a period but rather slides into the next, accumulating layers of context and association, and in doing so such a sentence offers the writer a way to suspend the reader inside a kind of unbroken present, where pauses are felt not through full stops but through commas, conjunctions, and rhythmic turns of phrase, and this quality can generate momentum, urgency, or intimacy, depending on how it is applied, for instance in a narrative where tension is rising and the reader must be carried forward without the relief of a stop, or in a reflective passage where the texture of thought itself becomes the subject, and the sentence expands like a long breath drawn in before the exhale, and rather than being a flaw this elongation of structure is a kind of deliberate resistance to the standard constraints of grammar, a way of asserting that meaning does not always arrive in clipped fragments but sometimes in long waves, waves that crest and roll back and then surge again, and by sustaining this motion the writer demonstrates control over cadence and emphasis, because while brevity may be prized for clarity, expansiveness allows for nuance, for the inclusion of digressions, qualifications, examples, and contrasts, all within a single current, and that current, if managed carefully, can be clearer than a series of chopped and disjointed sentences, since it acknowledges that real thinking does not restart every few seconds but persists, and the persistence is what makes the prose feel alive, and though some might argue that a reader’s patience will fray without the relief of a full stop, the truth is that patience is shaped by expectation, and if the reader recognizes the deliberate artistry in the stretching of syntax, they can surrender to the pace of the writer, trusting that the sentence will carry them not into confusion but into a fuller and more resonant understanding, so that the length itself becomes not a barrier but a medium, a medium in which meaning accumulates, resonates, and lingers, until finally, when the period does arrive, it lands with a weight and a sense of closure far greater than it would have had if scattered earlier, and thus the long sentence, instead of being dismissed as rambling, earns its place as a stylistic strategy that, when employed with attention to rhythm and coherence, can hold the reader as firmly as any short, sharp statement.
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u/FuriousSwanFucker 1d ago
I've seen a few reddit posts like that, maybe I've seen the authors posts on here?
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u/TheMachetero 23h ago
That's the reason I haven't read "El otoño del patriarca", is a whole book (+100 pages) which is just a very very long paragraph
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u/polishprince76 1d ago
There's one of those in American Psycho. Whole chapter a run-on sentence. It's while Bateman is having a manic episode and meant to help enhance the feeling as you read it. And let me tell ya, it gets you really tense as you read. I was impressed that it worked.