The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
question
interrupted dialogue
Ken-ichi
May 11, 2011 09:53AM
This is excerpted from my review, but it's still bothering me: what was up with the constant interruption of quotes?! For example:
The majority of quotes are written this way. In an unknown author, I might attribute this to a weird lexical tick, but Mitchell is a careful, meticulous writer capable of adopting many different voices and styles, so I think this has to be intentional. But what does it mean? I'm guessing the form has some relation to Japanese literature or poetry, but I don't know enough to make a connection.
Help, lazyweb!
'Chief va Cleef,' Fischer calls after him, 'and I shall discuss your insolence!'
'It's a long way,' Ivo Oost smokes in a doorway, 'down to the bottom...'
'It is my signature,' Fischer shouts after him, 'that authorizes your wages!' (p. 166)
The majority of quotes are written this way. In an unknown author, I might attribute this to a weird lexical tick, but Mitchell is a careful, meticulous writer capable of adopting many different voices and styles, so I think this has to be intentional. But what does it mean? I'm guessing the form has some relation to Japanese literature or poetry, but I don't know enough to make a connection.
Help, lazyweb!
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Joe, the book gets much better after you complete the first section. Book 2 is much more interesting and readable.
To me, it felt like a loose reference to haikus. The quotes are lines are split into 3 parts, and somewhere around 5/7 syllables per part. Now, it is less clear what Mitchell's purpose is in alluding to haikus like this. Perhaps it is simply a world-building technique, used to make readers feel immersed in the Japanese setting. Or perhaps it is something more involved about how people living in a foreign land begin to assimilate into a culture without realizing it, or something deeper than that.
Hmm. I didn't really notice it. Maybe he was trying to pull off what Patrick O'Brian does so well with the time/space jumps in the Aubrey/Maturin books: http://bit.ly/wbZtxr
But if it bothered you, perhaps it wasn't such as successful for Mitchell as it was for O'Brian.
But if it bothered you, perhaps it wasn't such as successful for Mitchell as it was for O'Brian.
I thought I was going to like this book, but quit 1/4 through it.
That's the only part of the book which I liked: the dialogues. This is so because I do want to read dialogues that interchange with descriptions of body language and other interruptions in a long sentence. However, I haven't found anyone who does this well. Perhaps Jose Saramago, though I suppose one can't fill a book with nothing but long sentences. But in general, this is what I expect from dialogues.
The ellipsis just indicates a broken train of thought, or speech. People in real life actually talk that way, so it seems vivid to me. Well, some people... Anyway, I thought the book was nearly flawless.
Mitchell is simply reflecting the fact that conversations/exchanges/dialogues can happen in parallel,simultaneously; women are past-masters(sic) of multi-dialoguing!
It is a way to make the words echo. It gives them a heavier weight, when necessary. It allows the words to taunt the character they're meant for and adding an action to the character who says them is a refreshing technique rather than using the old standby "said Fischer".
Perhaps Mitchell is mimicking a slower, interrupted 19th century prose style. But your thought is interesting. There are other forms of Japanese poetry other than haiku...
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