Many of us may have sensed this: Kathleen Jamie expresses it perfectly—
“If we work always in words, sometimes we need to recuperate in a place where language doesn’t join up, where we’re thrown back on a few elementary nouns. Sea. Bird. Sky” (Findings, 2005, p164).
I’ve come across a note I made when reading Eimear McBride’s Strange hotel (2021). At one point the drifting unnamed woman who is the central character is described as having a specific recollection “screwed into the vegetal bolts of her brain”. Please, how can anything be screwed into bolts? If the author overlooked this in haste, perhaps excusable, we’ve all done that: but what are editors for?
Some time ago I noted a few remarkable works of fiction that had taken ridiculous efforts before being accepted by a publisher. I mentioned Samuel Beckett, Paul Auster and Eimir McBride. I’ve since learned that Jane Austen submitted to a publisher a manuscript called ‘First impressions’ in 1797. From what we know of her thoroughness, it would not have been ordinary. The work was eventually published in 1813 under the title Pride and prejudice.
