To a certain degree, that is a valid stance to take but, ultimately, if you continue that way, you won’t have (m)any readers. I am reminded of Will Self who famously said I don’t really write for readers. I felt that it did not work in her first book. Experiment is good but, when it does not really work, it is not. But good authors use language in various ways to make their point and some succeed and some do not. Using language in various ways is, of course, one of the hallmarks of twentieth and twenty-first century literature and there are quite a few books on this site that do so. Difficult to read? Must be great and original, then. I found its main use was to make the book difficult to read without adding anything to it. McBride used her disjointed style throughout the novel. Joyce used, for example, baby talk at the beginning of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to good effect but only for a short section. It was not, not least because Joyce had done it a hundred years ago. I found the disjointed, staccato sentences distracting and felt that they added little to the book. I did not, on the whole, share the enthusiasm. Home » Ireland » Eimear McBride » The Lesser Bohemians Eimear McBride: The Lesser BohemiansĮimear McBride’s first novel received considerable acclaim from critics and won the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction.
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