In yesterday’s (January 23) Financial Times, there appeared a review by Adam Haslett of Stanley Fish’s How to Write a Sentence. The review was reprinted in Slate magazine. Stanley Fish’s book favoured short, clear sentences. His hero was Hemingway.
Haslett prefers a different model – G.B. Sebald. Haslett writes:
“The German expat novelist, W.G. Sebald, became a literary hero for his unclassifiable books The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, and Austerlitz not long before his early death 10 years ago. He offers a splendid example of what Fish calls ‘the subordinate style,’ in which time and causality are organized into clear hierarchies at the sentence level.
“His ruminative, meandering sentences (‘After I had made an appointment to meet Austerlitz the next day Pereria, having inquired after my wishes, led me upstairs to the first floor and showed me into a room containing a great deal of wine-red velvet, brocade, and dark mahogany furniture, where I sat until almost three in the morning at a secretaire faintly illuminated by the street lighting – the cast-iron radiator clicked quietly, and only occasionally did a black cab drive past outside in Liverpool Street – writing down, in the form of notes and disconnected sentences, as much as possible of what Austerlitz had told me that evening’) are almost too long to quote here.
“Sebald’s themes, like Proust’s, are memory and loss. What makes his books remarkable is that he reproduces the experience of having memories and losing them in the course of single sentences, like the one above, which often seem to forget their origins, slide off into an associative drift, and then attempt to recoup themselves, just as we attempt to hold together the memories and narratives that make up our sense of self.”
This is the conclusion of Haslett’s review:
“For those, and I would count myself among them, who fell in love with literature not by becoming enthralled to books they couldn’t put down but by discovering individual sentences whose rhythm and rhetoric was so compelling they couldn’t help but repeat them to anyone who would listen, it is a blessed replacement to that old…superego forever whispering in your ear – cut, cut, cut.”
The second and third videos in the series about the CBC’s This Hour Has Seven Days have been posted at YouTube.
Eric Koch’s book, The Weimar Triangle, is available at Indigo-Chapters and in your local bookstore. 
Don’t both kinds of sentences have their place and function?
Longer meandering sentences can be enticing, taking us down a long hall with fascinating pictures on the wall, allowing us to stop and reflect at will, or keep moving while digesting the backward and forward motion of our mind in contemplation of what we are being shown by the writer.
Short punchy sentences take us directly to the point.
Now, I want to read some Sebald.
You will not regret it. Start with the extraordinary Austerlitz.
The Haslett review can be found here.
Both kinds of sentences may indeed have their place and function, but not everyone can write both kinds well. Absent the extraordinary talents of Sebald and Schatzky, most of us would be prudent to heed the admonitions attributed to Lord Denning: never use two words where one would do (actually a lift from Thomas Jefferson), and never use one sentence where two would do.
Or better still – say it in Latin.
May I please direct you to the web-site of the http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/ . The Bulwer-Lytton Contest is in honour of the author a novel starting with:
“It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents–except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.”
–Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830)
One wonders whether contemporaries like Dickens also considered this bad writing.
Then there’s this, spotted randomly in yesterday’s NYTimes obits: “Dr XYZ, known for his ambidextrous forehands and ground-breaking prostate research, passed away…”
What’s wrong with that?
Please don’t answer.