Good lines: on storytelling

 

    "Once he got going, my grandfather's way of telling a story was to go pell-mell, throwing Aristotle's unities of action, place and time into the air and in a tumult let the details tumble down the stairs of his brain and out his mouth. He had grown up in an age when storytelling was founded on the forthright principles of passing the time and dissolving the hours of dark. [...] To conquer both time and reality then, one of the unwritten tenets of the local poetics was that a story must never arrive at the point, or risk conclusion. And because in Faha, like in all country places, time was the only thing people could afford, all stories were long, all storytellers took their, and your, and anyone else's, time, and all gave it up willingly, understanding that tales of anything as aberrant and contrary as human beings had to be long, not to say convoluted, had to be so long that they wouldn't, and in fact couldn't, be finished this side of the grave, and only for the fire gone out and the birds of dawn singing might be continuing still."

Niall Williams, This Is Happiness

Comments

[Fran H-B]

Only discovered Niall Williams earlier this year, looking forward to reading his latest. I love his quiet style; books which stay with me long after the last word has been read.

[Christine Harding]

Is this the same Niall Williams who wrote History of the Rain, which I thought was wonderful?

[Cornflower]

I was trying to think earlier of the right word for Niall's style and I came up with 'gentle', but 'quiet' is spot on, Fran.

[Cornflower]

It is indeed the same, Christine, and I loved that book, too; it was my novel of the year when it came out.