LITERATURE
I’ve spent the past two weeks reading novels by various writers, some badly written, others remarkable, and many mediocre. Writing, in literature, is about expressing not just ideas but state, emotion, and most importantly, mood. A certain character is determined almost entirely by the form of the sentences and their pace. Content tells their story, but the writer’s choice of syntax and tone defines the internal impulses of each individual. Hemingway has lead and influenced many with his journalistic, perfected, and iconic short sharp sentences. So much that, among American and foreign writers alike, many attempt to emulate those complete phrases and tend to occasionally abuse them. For him, they worked. They worked because he found pace, tone, and syntax that was distinct from sentence length. He was, arguably, a master of the short form.
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Others are not. Few, in fact, are. Rawi Hage is one of a series of writers selected for this issue’s reading list. In reading his book De Niro’s Game, I found him to be too similar to Hemingway for the first few chapters, until his writing developed and picked up into what is decidedly the tone and pace of his story and characters. Bassam is not a Hemingway character. He is not cold, sardonic, or anything that resembles the typical attitude of the legendary stories of the Jazz Age. Still, he comes off as such, and it is somewhat disorienting. It is disorienting because it stands alone, outside of the story being told, and seems to disconnect the reader from that is actually happening. Not until the story progress does the form and style of the writer begin to develop into the uniqueness that made
his book a success, a joyful exercise in egotistical literature and enjoyable narrative. Not until he finally found his own voice did the book take off and express a story that is simultaneously intriguing and exciting. This got me thinking about how I put my sentences together. When I read, I absorb a writer’s style and I try to anticipate why and how things are built by that writer to establish a final output equal to the calibre of great fiction. I ramble when I write. Some others do so as well, but it is rare to find rambles that can capture the essence of the characters involved and the attention of the readers. While having always admired Hemingway in his way of writing, I rarely found myself capable of sticking to short journalistic authorship: I have always preferred by verbosity, my ranting, and my pseudo-postmodern