One Sentence Wonders
Fifteen stories. Fifteen sentences.
On the last morning before his town is flooded for a reservoir, a man walks through it with a clipboard, filling out a government form - description, condition, salvage value - for every building he has ever known. He does it in one sentence, and by the end you understand that the form was never the inventory he came to make.
That is the premise of this collection: fifteen stories, each a single unbroken sentence. No paragraph breaks. Whatever a sentence picks up in its first clause it has to carry all the way to the period.
A sentence can hold the last minute of a lunar landing, the first sight of a newborn's face, the long seconds after something breaks aboard an airplane. It can follow a confession through every attempt to evade it. It can stretch two minutes across thousands of words because the person living them cannot bear to miss anything - or cannot bear what comes next.
Inside:
A novelist with one published book and seven years of not writing a second enters a one-sentence-story contest, and discovers that the hardest mark in the language is the smallest one.
A grandmother writes out her mole negro on the backs of leftover funeral programs, four generations of instruction set down in order - and withholds exactly one step.
A court interpreter breaks the rule that has kept the word "I" from ever meaning her. A translator answers a twenty-seven-year-old accusation in a footnote. A medieval scribe confesses the error he found in his dead nephew's hand and chose not to correct.
An astronaut watches the Moon become a place where human beings have arrived. A woman passes through the last minutes before she sees her daughter. A pilot feels the airplane go wrong before the instruments tell him.
A compass needle turns slightly aside, and a scientist notices. The Sun disappears, and a watcher discovers what daylight has concealed. Across a restaurant table, a woman waits for the question that may change the direction of her life.
In the New Mexico desert, a witness to the first atomic explosion watches a possibility become something the world will have to live with.
And two sentences reach further still: one through the whole counsel of Scripture, from before creation to the world without end; the other through the universe itself, every star a subordinate clause and every life a syllable, given exactly one full stop at the far end of the dark.
For readers who go in for the long line - Hrabal, Bernhard, Saramago, Ellmann, the last chapter of Ulysses - and for anyone who has ever wished a moment would last, or wondered how much longer it could possibly go on.
Fifteen stories. Fifteen periods. Hold your breath.
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