Bruce Robbins at The Baffler:
Did the novels of the twentieth century accomplish anything? Edwin Frank, who is known for his love of the genre, is convinced they did. In his stylish, selective survey Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel, he focuses on the genre’s formal innovations, which take readers’ minds off their somewhat vulgar appetite for suspenseful plot and relatable character and teach them to be satisfied, instead, with something like a diet of single sentences, exquisitely prepared. The genre’s masterworks urge us to set a slower pace, savoring what each novelist puts on the table and realizing, as we push back our chairs, how much more substantial the meal was than what we thought we wanted.
There is both instruction and pleasure to be had from Frank’s commentaries on modernist sentence-making. In German, as he notes, the run-on sentence doesn’t violate any rules, but Kafka takes the run-on and runs away with it, adding “slight nervous shifts of tone and implication, abrupt introductions of unforeseen elements that are then absorbed without comment, as if expected.” This procedure makes these sentences “an endless surprise, entertaining disconcerting, effortless, tortured, suddenly funny, and wonderfully sad.”
more here.
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