(originally posted on September 28, 2008)
I will say up front that I'm going to have to read this about three more times before I understand Durrenmatt's intentions clearly. But even on a first read it's easy to recognize the brilliance of its conceit, using twenty-four chapters of a single sentence each to convey the natural and frightening extension of relying too heavily on images, moving and otherwise. The quality here is deliberately hallucinatory as the reader seems to fall into the narrative clause by clause, comma by comma, so no wonder the effect is both confusing and revelatory. Durrenmatt died a decade and a half before YouTube and long before today's on-demand world, but he would have had a field day with current technological developments - and their ills - had he lived.
