Denotation and Connotation: enjoy!

A recent and very fascinating thread on WriteWords has been unpicking the opening of Eleanor Catton's story "Two Tides", which was published in a recent issue of Granta (the Summer 2009 New Fiction Special, if you want to track the story down). I won't précis the discussion here, because the whole thread's worth reading and ranges over a good deal of ground, (the story's well worth reading too) but even a single sentence (or rather, half sentence) illuminates all sorts of interesting things...