The Joy of the Five Page Sentence

This won't take long but it will be breathless.

I remember when Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 came out. I was waiting for it. There was a buzz. And I had intended for it to be the longest book I had ever read. But I didn't know at that point it would contain the longest sentence I’d ever read. Bolaño’s now famous five-page sentence didn’t simply excite me because of it’s length, however, but because of the accumulating energy of it, the death defying nature of it, the trapezeiance of it. There was a moment - I couldn’t pinpoint it now - like with Hitchcock or that scene in the first season of True Detective when Rust Cohl goes into the ghetto to retrieve an informant, where you realise this is one take, and the choreography involved, the wonder and awe of it, takes on a life outside of the fiction being sustained by it. One of my favourite critics, James Woods, likens this long sentence game to “punting a leaf”, and that’s as good a description as you’ll get. Or maybe keep-ups with a balloon. As you breathe through the sentence, the rhythm you are folded into translates to an immersive experience with the information in that sentence ie. this part of the story.