Post by account_disabled on Nov 27, 2023 7:06:06 GMT 2
Even some famous writer – who I don't remember now – claims the same thing. A novel like Gargantua and Pantagruel would never have been published today in the form we know. Of its almost 900 pages, perhaps only half would have remained. There is a lot of superfluous material in that story, but I am convinced that after the editorial cuts of today's mentality that novel would not have had the same beauty it has today. It is as if Rabelais had fun writing chapter after chapter on the most useless scenes, such as the fifty-sixth of the first book, which tells of "How the religious men and women of the Abbey of Thelème were dressed". It is also true that the chapters of Gargantua and Pantagruel rarely exceed two or three pages, but some are only apparently useless. I wrote in italics because, in my opinion, as I read those "useless" chapters they no longer seem so. Add color to the story Along with Rabelais' work I am also reading Roderick Duddle by Michele Mari.
Another story that someone would surely have chopped up here and there. There are continuous interferences from the narrator, but which in reality are not interferences: it is just the narration method chosen by Mari for that story. Every now and then there is some small digression, some parenthesis Phone Number Data that for a moment makes me think "this song could have been cut", but it's only a moment, it arrives and then disappears, because that is the story that Mari chose to tell and he tells it as it pleases him. Some passages from both Gargantua and Pantagruel and Mari's Roderick Duddle give color to the story, make it more complete, in a certain sense, allowing the reader to enter more easily into the world that the authors have created, to know it and imagine it better. Avoid stretching the broth A mistake that can happen is to go on too long, perhaps creating some subplot just to lengthen the story, increase the number of pages and thus justify the creation of a book.
But I didn't have this feeling in Rabelais as it wasn't in Mari or in other authors whose substantial books I've read – the Roderick Duddle is almost 500 pages long, so it's not a short novel. In The Pillars of the Earth , however, which I have already written about, I would have made several cuts on those 1000-odd pages, basically everything that could be defined as an infodump , even if not everyone will agree with this statement. Details upon architectural details are completely useless and slowed down my reading, as well as boring me. Is reducing history to the bare bones really functional? While I'm writing the story for self-publishing, amid constant interruptions and blocks of various kinds, I realized that so far I've written almost 130 pages of a novel reduced to the essence. And that's not good. The revision will be hard work.
Another story that someone would surely have chopped up here and there. There are continuous interferences from the narrator, but which in reality are not interferences: it is just the narration method chosen by Mari for that story. Every now and then there is some small digression, some parenthesis Phone Number Data that for a moment makes me think "this song could have been cut", but it's only a moment, it arrives and then disappears, because that is the story that Mari chose to tell and he tells it as it pleases him. Some passages from both Gargantua and Pantagruel and Mari's Roderick Duddle give color to the story, make it more complete, in a certain sense, allowing the reader to enter more easily into the world that the authors have created, to know it and imagine it better. Avoid stretching the broth A mistake that can happen is to go on too long, perhaps creating some subplot just to lengthen the story, increase the number of pages and thus justify the creation of a book.
But I didn't have this feeling in Rabelais as it wasn't in Mari or in other authors whose substantial books I've read – the Roderick Duddle is almost 500 pages long, so it's not a short novel. In The Pillars of the Earth , however, which I have already written about, I would have made several cuts on those 1000-odd pages, basically everything that could be defined as an infodump , even if not everyone will agree with this statement. Details upon architectural details are completely useless and slowed down my reading, as well as boring me. Is reducing history to the bare bones really functional? While I'm writing the story for self-publishing, amid constant interruptions and blocks of various kinds, I realized that so far I've written almost 130 pages of a novel reduced to the essence. And that's not good. The revision will be hard work.
