Quote:
Originally Posted by elphenor
never read a novel that consists of a collection of vignettes to be ready in any order
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This sentence is quite ambiguous: Are you chopping down a sentence that would otherwise begin,
"I have never read a novel...."
or are you giving us a tip:
"Don't read a novel..." ?
Either way, your comment reminded me of the novel
Eyeless In Gaza, which I have mentioned here before. It's a story that ranges from 1902 to 1935, but Aldous Huxley rejected conventional narrative sequence: instead each chapter is titled with a date, and the dates are all shuffled up. It quickly gets bewildering, unless you do what I did: make a list of page numbers so that you can jump around the book and follow the chronological order. That's when it becomes both less demanding and more satisfying.