Slog News & Arts

Line Out

Music & Nightlife

« Naked Lunch | "Change That Works for Him" »

Tuesday, July 8, 2008

I’ll Wait Until the Trilogy is Done

posted by on July 8 at 15:45 PM

io9 reports on the new, free downloadable version of the world’s longest novel, Marienbad, My Love, by Mark Leach. It’s 12.6 million words long. The press release has all kinds of interesting information about the book’s record-breakingness, including:

* the world’s longest word. Also called “the holy Jah,” the 4.4-million-letter noun is a coinage of words from the world’s faiths. It means “god within.”

* the world’s longest sentence (3 million words).

* the world’s longest book title (6,700 words).

The website also has the Top Ten reasons to read Marienbad, My Love:

1. A giant orbiting UFO 2. Nazi/alien collaborations 3. Alien abductions 4. Human/alien hybrids 5. Mind control 6. Religious insects from outer space 7. A mad scientist 8. An evil CEO 9. A time-traveling, green-skinned monster of the unconscious 10. The end of the world

You know, I’ve been trying to find another book to revive Book Club of the Damned here on Slog, but I think I’d rather choose a book that I can successfully read in my lifetime. Still and all, it’s totally free! Go! Download! Enjoy! And don’t say I never gave you anything.

RSS icon Comments

1

It can't possibly be any good if its main selling points are its length and a long word.

Posted by Jason Josephes | July 8, 2008 3:51 PM
2

This is equivalent to the worlds largest hamburger; a feat that means nothing because the substance of it isn't consumable.

Posted by Bellevue Ave | July 8, 2008 3:52 PM
3

Hmm. I remember reading a German SF series that had many hundreds of books ... if those were compiled together, it might be longer.

Remember, never fear the Decalogy ...

Posted by Will in Seattle | July 8, 2008 3:56 PM
4

Vomit.

Posted by Fnarf | July 8, 2008 4:00 PM
5

Someone read too much Faulkner in school...

Posted by Jubilation T. Cornball | July 8, 2008 4:12 PM
6

The downloads are .doc files! Absurd!

Posted by Chris | July 8, 2008 4:13 PM
7

on the upside, one word is 1/3 of the book.

a mad scientist and an evil CEO?!
that's tempting reading.

Posted by chops | July 8, 2008 4:23 PM
8

Isn't this a job for a new public intern?

Posted by vooodooo84 | July 8, 2008 4:31 PM
9

A novel whose only claim to fame is some stupid record-breaking is sci-fi/fantasy? I'm shocked.

Posted by Emily | July 8, 2008 4:44 PM
10

Wow, they really are distributing .doc files.  Any bets at least one of them contains a macro virus?

Posted by lostboy | July 8, 2008 4:51 PM
11

No, no, no. This is not a book. This is a stupid gimmick dressed up to look like a book. Inside a .doc file that probably has a few macro viruses.

Posted by Greg | July 9, 2008 9:35 AM
12

Jorge Luis Borges claimed that writing long books was an act of decadence, a ruinous endeavor. “To go on for five hundred pages developing an idea whose perfect oral exposition is possible in a few minutes! A better course of procedure is to pretend that these books already exist, and then to offer a resume, a commentary . . . More reasonable, more inept, more indolent, I have preferred to write notes upon imaginary books.”

Why not follow Borges lead? Add “Marienbad My Love” to your BOOK CLUB OF THE DAMNED, then invited readers to post commentaries based on what they IMAGINE this abomination of a novel to be. I will offer the first entry:

The world’s largest Complete Waste of Time: a review of “Marienbad My Love” -----

Thanks to the seemingly limitless egalitarianism that is the Internet, we the more discerning members of the reading public are once again subjected to the unvetted, insipid storytelling of a novelist wannabe with a tin ear and hopeless delusions of superiority without correspondingly superior achievements.

Welcome to “Marienbad My Love,” the world’s largest Complete Waste of Time.

Dear reader, I have suffered much to bring you this commentary. I have traveled to the back of beyond, where I have consumed – and almost been consumed by – the 12.6 million words of this horrendous offense against literature. “Marienbad My Love” is obtuse and pretentious. My literary sensibilities have been deeply offended and damaged by the awfulness that is this thing’s plot. It is terrible. This lame and utterly transparent attempt to mimic genuine writing is a sad, stupid gimmick dressed up to look like a book – an overly-long, self-indulgent product of a talentless and virtually illiterate hack. Rest assured, “Finnegans Wake” has not yet been dethroned. “Marienbad My Love” is the world’s most unreadable novel.

A bit harsh, you say? In a moment of misplaced compassion, we might be tempted to mislead ourselves into believing this isn’t quite a bad as it seems. “Let’s give it a chance,” you might say. But that would be so wrong. The incoherent ramblings of an insane mind don’t equal art; they are just incoherent. We do the mentally ill no service to pretend otherwise.

Creations like “Marienbad My Love” represent the dark side of the Internet. We are diminished by their very existence. Let us drive their creators from our midst. Let us dispatch the narcissistic train wreck that is Mark Leach back under his rock in the barren wasteland of that monstrous and uncultured territory that has inflicted upon our great nation so many misfortunes and tortures, including a murderous, mental reject for a president and (on a lighter note) the dubious institution of country-and-western line dancing. Let us assign Leach and his abomination of a novel to richly deserved oblivion.

Posted by Mark S. | July 13, 2008 9:19 AM

Comments Closed

Comments are closed on this post.