Have you ever read a book with no paragraph breaks, the entire 289 pages consisting of one extremely long paragraph?

If you take my advice, you are about to.

Dead Souls is the title of a famous nineteenth-century Russian novel by Nikolai Gogol, but that’s not the Dead Souls I’m writing about today. The Dead Souls I’m writing about today is by Sam Riviere, published in 2021, and it consists of one extremely long paragraph.

What is it like to read a novel consisting of one extremely long paragraph, that also repeats certain words and phrases with mesmeric frequency? And that uses italics regularly and fruitfully?

The unnamed narrator of this strange and beautiful novel gives a poetry reading, standing in for a famed poet who is unable to be there in person. And then something uncanny happens:

“They had allowed it to continue, for a period of two or three minutes, which in reality is a long time to keep up disruptive activity of this sort—two or three minutes of sustained disruption, caused by the running of a finger around the rim of a wine glass, to some extent ignored and to some extent covered up by the ten or so people surrounding the culprit. Perhaps more. Perhaps more members of the audience had become aware of the intentional disturbance, and with their silence came close to sanctioning it, to acquiescing to it, at least—parhaps part of them secretly approved of the disruption, because they had detected something in the event, namely in my recital of Zariyah Zhadan’s poetry in English, that was deserving of this kind of response, that in a certain way invited it. They had sat there with all their worthy feelings about Zariyah Zhadan’s poetry, perversely enjoying the disruption of the recital by a finger circling the rim of a wine glass.”

Now isn’t that hypnotic? Imagine reading an entire 289-page novel full of such circular, repetitive language, as if someone is swinging a medallion before your eyes.

There is also a hint of paranoia in this passage, and which runs throughout the whole book. Is it not just the person with the wine glass who is rebelling against the poetry reading, but everyone seated around that person? Is it not just the people seated around the culprit but even more of the audience?

Have you ever read a book with no paragraph breaks, the entire 289 pages consisting of one extremely long paragraph?

I advise you to do this.

One extremely long paragraph, with no paragraph breaks, might be just the thing to get you out of that normal-book rut you’re in.

Or it might actually be compulsory.

You know, not everyone is your friend.

Just pointing that out.

And pointing out that an entire 289-page novel is shorter than it could be, or would be, if things weren’t cut off suddenly and horrifically at the—