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Angela Carter makes me want to wet myself with delight at the beautiful and tantric misuse of commas.
From Nights at the Circus --
The only sounds drifting from the menagerie, the continuous murmuring purr of the great cats, like a distant sea, and the faint jingling of Colonel Kearney's elephants of flesh and blood as they rattled the chains on their legs as they did continually, all their waking hours, since in their millennial and long-lived patience they knew quite well how, in a hundred years, or a thousand years' time, or else, perhaps, tomorrow, in an hour's time, for it was all a gamble, a million to one chance, but all the same there was a chance that if they kept on shaking their chains, one day, some day, the clasps upon the shackles would part.
From The Passion of New Eve --
When I heard the faint music made by the house itself, I felt myself already in the presence of Tristessa, as if she were one of those super-sensitive ghosts who manifest their presence by only a sound, an oudour, or an impression of themselves that they leave on the air behind them-- a sense, a feeling that, for no definable reason, penetrates us with a pure anguish, as if they were telling us, in the only way left to them, that is, by a direct intervention on our sensibilities, how much, how very much they want to be alive and how impossible it is for them to be so. |
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