Nearly as long a a life sentence.....

Just a quick blog this evening, folks, to share with you my amazing new discovery. I do believe I have found the longest sentence in the world – not the prison variety, but the written type.

I thought Anthony Powell and Aphra Behn were bad enough for long sentences, but this one takes the biscuit. Or should that be coconut…..?

For my OU module, I have to read Sam Selvedon’s “The Lonely Londoners” which is written from the narrator’s viewpoint. The narrator in this book comes from Trinidad, therefore this book is written in both first and third person in Creole – so at the best of times, it is quite hard to “get” (especially for a grammar snob like me!).

Well, I was going great guns until I reached page 92. Then something happened. Either the narrator (via the author) had swallowed some oral laxative, or there had been an error in publishing (I have the Penguin Modern Classics version) but a sentence started which went on and on and on and on and on, without punctuation or paragraph breaks, and on and on for TEN pages! So not only was I craving a strong dose of caffeine, but I was having to decipher a constant stream of Creole, trying to get it to make sense by inserting full-stops etc into the appropriate places. Phew!

Excuse the poor quality of the photo – my dinosaur iphone 3GS has a rubbish set of cameras – but these are pages 2 and 3 of the neverending sentence. It’s like a game – “Make the next ten pages make sense – extreme edition featuring Creole English”.

Hmmm, methinks it won’t catch on.