The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler.

I enjoyed the book a good deal more in its last quarter or so, when the plot sharply diverges from the film version. (I like the film version, but the close parallelism of it to the book made reading the first three-fourths somewhat tedious.)

Before the action really kicks in, though, what interested me was the description. It's not uniformly good, but it is very frequently extensive, even belabored. What interests me, though, is not so much its quality as its role in the novel. Let's take the following, rather lengthy passage:
Perhaps it is merely due to my perceptions of the genre, but this seems unnaturally verbose (even florid) for the "hardboiled" aesthetic. While a number of very short declarative sentences punctuate this long descriptive section, the average number of words per sentence is about 16. Perhaps that is not very long (for fun, I found a passage on the same numbered page—page 31—of the Lydia Davis translation of Swann's Way which has an almost identical number of words, and the words-per-sentence figure there is about 39.5), but it is not exactly laconic. The reputation for hardboiled terseness, then, probably derives more from the relative frequency of these short, declarative sentences rather than an overall, consistent effect of close-lippedness.

But I'd like to focus more on the role of detail in this passage. Detail, generally speaking, has a few narrative functions. Scene-setting, of course, meaning the provision of details necessary to understand the action, but in this passage, the details which actually perform this function are relatively few: the cordite and ether smells and the nudity. These elements are going to


Source:blographia-literaria.com

by:Shital