The Hedge Book

A Spaniard's attempt to do a "1984" (Orwell) with a Big Brother who sounds both sinister and silly, a principal protagonist whose job is to copy an endless rows of zeroes, nightmarish punishments (e.g., becoming dog-like and tied up on a leash, a relentlessly growing hedge imprisoning you) and some unique, supremely irritating writing tricks the most memorable of which would be those words with missing letters in the end (assho!") and punctuation marks spelled out in words--


"His muzzle was stubby and black and comma at the end of it comma the clearly defined holes comma like musical notes comma and the look in his hazel eyes watchful and alert as if he were still alive period The short stiff hair on the head became thicker at the ears comma where the graceful curve of the neck began comma brutally slashed by the knife blade at the point where the brown blot on the thorax began spreading over the back to the hindquarters period The ceiling of the room was high and the walls white and bare with large Gothic windows comma with no inside shutters or curtains comma open to the darkness of the night and over the long white marble table floated five globes of light comma whose studied arrangement eliminated all shadows period There was a strong smell of carbolic acid and after the dry and deliberate noise of footsteps along the long bare corridor click-click-click comma the silence of the room became especially thick period The head was resting on the clean cut made by the knife and a thin trickle of almost black clotted blood was spreading along the marble end of paragraph"

Like Delibes dictated the entire novel to a dumb secretary.

Anyway, a challenge would have been if Delibes had to write a sentence about a woman having her monthly period. Would he have written: "The woman is having her period period"? But the reader with an unaccustomed brain would probably interpreted it as "The woman is having her.." which might convey the idea that the sentence is not complete, like those in the dialogues of Faulkner or Gaddis novels.

What, anyway, is that click-click-click?