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Afterwards I remembered with particular clarity seeing her in the doorway of the sitting room, our Anna, apparently calm, staring at Eduardo, who having turned towards the door, now pushed himself heavily up out of his armchair and stood facing the girl, who then moved swiftly towards him, her face white and her lips pressed tight together, and holding out her hands to him – and me thinking, it’s going to be all right after all – and Eduardo giving her his hand, and a second later a sharp loud cry of pain – fuck! – as he pulls violently away, his hand crumpling like a leaf and blood flowing, and him staring at it with his jaws and eyes wide, the blood pouring from between his clawing fingers as though he is trying to cup a bowl of it in his palm and cannot, for it is streaming through his fingers and splashing on to the polished hardwood floor.

This long piece, a sentence and paragraph in one, is from Patrick McGrath’s book from last year, Port Mungo.

Anna, Gin’s niece, has come back and seen Gin talking with Eduardo, Gin’s ex-lover. What I particularly enjoy reading this entire long sentence as one paragraph itself is the way Gin is lying to herself (and the reader) that she has remembered the scene clearly. The main clause of the sentence states her remembering clearly seeing Anna in the room. The rest of the sentence is in a loose, as opposed to periodic style, with trailing dependent clauses, a few of which having their own dependent clauses, like an onion or a Russian doll. It should, therefore, be quite easy to read and assimilate, as the main theme or topic is already given at the start of the sentence, and the clauses following are new information expanding on the theme. These new information begins with Gin being sentimental about seeing Anna calm and staring at Eduardo. Gin sees Eduardo getting up from his chair and Anna going at him with her hands out. There’s a break, like an aside, with Gin reassuring herself. She sees Eduardo offering his hand to Anna. Gin hears his cry: the four-letter expletive inside the dash parenthesis offers the perfect contrast to the earlier aside - in length, in mood, in speed of delivery. Gin sees his hand flowing with blood and his reaction to this, then her seeing is back to his bloody hand, and to the blood falling onto the floor.

Gin, all this while, has censored her memory of the event. She has left out the parts in her remembering in which there is a razor blade Anna uses to slash at Eduardo’s hand.

Naipaul is very, very wrong in declaring fiction to be dead. When a writer can produce such writing as above, fiction is still alive and kicking, as far as I’m concerned.