Kevin's Watch

Rigel wrote:I'm actually relieved to know I'm not a mindless fan-boy

Cail wrote:The last two books have been utterly lacking in those good qualities. I don't care about the characters, and the story hasn't grabbed me.

... And it’s never enough to describe something once: If a thing can be old, withered, seared by Time and flattened by the weight of years all in one sentence, Donaldson will barely consider the subject fairly covered.

In a fifty-word poem it’s usual to skew a word out of its habitual use or grammatical purpose in order to give it ambiguity and compact more meaning into it. Doing this for a three-volume epic slows things up criminally. Some of Donaldson’s writing is powerful, full of turns of phrase that startle and delight. But he can’t stop; cleverness piled on cleverness leads to something less than wisdom.

"With a howl that shivered the air, echoed savagely off the carven walls, beat against the battlements like an ululation of fangs and claws and hungry blades….."

I beg your pardon? If somebody knows how to make a sharp object ‘ululate,’ let me know. This is plain word misuse and it drives me nuts.

"His lips were contorted with a paroxysm of savage glee; ecstatic rage shone on his wet teeth…"

Shone on his wet teeth? What, rage? From where? It’s not a typo; Donaldson does it all the time.

He also makes up words like ‘trepidations’ or ‘diminishless’ which draw attention to the cleverness of his style when you’d rather be getting on with the story. Worse is the desire to use every word in the dictionary including ones for which he doesn’t know the meaning. He may believe that saying a woman’s hair is "raddled with honey-coloured streaks" sounds good in a complimentary passage, but "raddled" means "excessively or badly rouged," "dilapidated, unkempt…"

OK, and then there’s personification. On the one hand, having everything described in terms that seethe with life can be seen as either a result of the Land’s vivid life or Covenant’s hypersensitivity to it:

"A snarl jumped across his teeth, and his shoulders hunched as he strangled such thoughts.

"As they rode onwards, the silence between them glistened like the white eyes of fear."

"The mountains seemed to spring abruptly out of the ground like a frozen instant of ambuscade…."

"A frown clenched his brow like (insert prolix simile here)"

It gives the sense that you are reading a Van Gogh: everything on the brink of breaking into independent life. But when Donaldson overdoes it you find you’ve lurched out of Van Gogh into some lurid Seventies velvet painting. You know: the kind of thing with the bare-breasted South Sea Islands girl. [link]

The rules are simple. Each player takes a different volume of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, and at the word "go" all open their books at random and start leafing through, scanning the pages. The winner is the first player to find the word "clench". It's a fast, exciting game -- sixty seconds is unusually drawn-out -- and can be varied, if players get too good, with other favourite Donaldson words like wince, flinch, gag, rasp, exigency, mendacity, articulate, macerate, mien, limn, vertigo, cynosure.... It's a great way to get thrown out of bookshops. Good racing! [link]

Demondim-spawn wrote:Of the people I've convinced to read TCTC, all have enjoyed or loved them.

Demondim-spawn wrote:Obscure words embedded in byzantine passages cluttered with clauses that are hoary with cobwebs by the time I reach the end of them turn me on.

In a fifty-word poem it’s usual to skew a word out of its habitual use or grammatical purpose in order to give it ambiguity and compact more meaning into it. Doing this for a three-volume epic slows things up criminally. Some of Donaldson’s writing is powerful, full of turns of phrase that startle and delight. But he can’t stop; cleverness piled on cleverness leads to something less than wisdom.

"With a howl that shivered the air, echoed savagely off the carven walls, beat against the battlements like an ululation of fangs and claws and hungry blades….."

I beg your pardon? If somebody knows how to make a sharp object ‘ululate,’ let me know. This is plain word misuse and it drives me nuts.

"His lips were contorted with a paroxysm of savage glee; ecstatic rage shone on his wet teeth…"

Shone on his wet teeth? What, rage? From where? It’s not a typo; Donaldson does it all the time.

He also makes up words like ‘trepidations’ or ‘diminishless’ which draw attention to the cleverness of his style when you’d rather be getting on with the story. Worse is the desire to use every word in the dictionary including ones for which he doesn’t know the meaning. He may believe that saying a woman’s hair is "raddled with honey-coloured streaks" sounds good in a complimentary passage, but "raddled" means "excessively or badly rouged," "dilapidated, unkempt…"

OK, and then there’s personification. On the one hand, having everything described in terms that seethe with life can be seen as either a result of the Land’s vivid life or Covenant’s hypersensitivity to it:

"A snarl jumped across his teeth, and his shoulders hunched as he strangled such thoughts.

"As they rode onwards, the silence between them glistened like the white eyes of fear."

"The mountains seemed to spring abruptly out of the ground like a frozen instant of ambuscade…."

"A frown clenched his brow like (insert prolix simile here)"

It gives the sense that you are reading a Van Gogh: everything on the brink of breaking into independent life. But when Donaldson overdoes it you find you’ve lurched out of Van Gogh into some lurid Seventies velvet painting. You know: the kind of thing with the bare-breasted South Sea Islands girl. [link]

wayfriend wrote: It gives the sense that you are reading a Van Gogh: everything on the brink of breaking into independent life. But when Donaldson overdoes it you find you’ve lurched out of Van Gogh into some lurid Seventies velvet painting. You know: the kind of thing with the bare-breasted South Sea Islands girl. [link]

The rules are simple. Each player takes a different volume of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, and at the word "go" all open their books at random and start leafing through, scanning the pages. The winner is the first player to find the word "clench". It's a fast, exciting game -- sixty seconds is unusually drawn-out -- and can be varied, if players get too good, with other favourite Donaldson words like wince, flinch, gag, rasp, exigency, mendacity, articulate, macerate, mien, limn, vertigo, cynosure.... It's a great way to get thrown out of bookshops. Good racing! [link]

Rigel wrote:The fact that the link was NOT to "a velvet painting [of a] bare-breasted South Sea Islands girl" is a criminal example of miscommunication.

Demondim-spawn wrote:

Rigel wrote:The fact that the link was NOT to "a velvet painting [of a] bare-breasted South Sea Islands girl" is a criminal example of miscommunication.

The link was wayfriend's to the source material, not the author's to a hypothetical velvet painting.

Rigel wrote:Yes, I know. I still feel cheated

CovenantJr wrote: I first read the Chronicles when I was 16. The rape didn't bother me in the slightest. Not that I was unaffected by it as a scene, you understand, but it didn't for a moment affect my reading enjoyment any more than would Covenant eating a cake. It was just something that happened in the book. I don't understand the big fuss.