David Alba­hari is the Ser­bian-born Cana­di­an author, most recent­ly, of the nov­el Leech­es. The book is a feat of mag­ic, an exis­ten­tial philo­soph­i­cal nov­el that’s also fun­ny and with enough mys­ter­ies to keep the read­er guess­ing. It’s also one long para­graph — that’s right, a 300-page-long para­graph. Here, Mr. Alba­hari explains the motive behind his madness.

There are sev­er­al rea­sons why I write my nov­els in one long para­graph. First of all, I sim­ply like it, I like when black words com­plete­ly cov­er the white­ness of paper. Sec­ond­ly, I feel that when I write in a long para­graph, I am pay­ing hom­mage to the writ­ers who influ­enced me with their own long sen­tences and para­graphs – William Faulkn­er, Thomas Wolfe, Franz Kaf­ka, Samuel Beck­ett, Thomas Bern­hard. And final­ly, I write like that because I believe that a sto­ry or a nov­el is cre­at­ed in the joint effort between the writer and the read­er through the act of read­ing. The long para­graph is like a dark labyrinth through which they have to find their way. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, many read­ers would rather read books writ­ten in short sen­tences than a nov­el or a col­lec­tion of short sto­ries try­ing to explore new pos­si­bil­i­ties in the world of fic­tion. Per­haps they have had enough of post­mod­ern and metafic­tion­al lit­er­a­ture and believe they deserve a break? That might be why many of them recoil when they are faced with a nov­el writ­ten in a three-hun­dred-page-long para­graph, con­vinced that it is more dif­fi­cult to read than a reg­u­lar nov­el. That pre­sump­tion is wrong because a one-para­graph nov­el also has its dia­logues, descrip­tions, new para­graphs, and even new chap­ters. True, they are not so marked but any atten­tive read­er will rec­og­nize them in the process of read­ing. Read­ing should always be fun, I agree, but it should also be for learn­ing and understanding.

David Alba­hari is the author of the new nov­el Leech­es. He will be blog­ging all week for the Vis­it­ing Scribe.