Instead, he finds himself engaged in a series of digressions with Jos Kaporal, a burned-out researcher for the BBC.
Schalansky, who is also a graphic designer, accompanies Inge's digressions with drawings, in a nod to the East German textbooks she grew up with.
And a few digressions with a dandyish critic, whose only purpose is to limp wristedly flutter his handkerchief and repeatedly declare Shakespeare a forgettable failure.
Ms. Benanti, a Tony winner for "Gypsy," delivers Mrs. Givings's madcap digressions with spiky, decidedly contemporary inflections, accentuating the proto-modernity trapped under those constricting corsets.
That is why its tempo is so explicit with slowness, syncopated with digression.
"Lincoln's Virtues" is filled with digressions, irrelevancies, arguments with other historians and annoying asides.
Indeed, Bruce sets up a profound, uproarious digression on Jews with the claim that "when people are liberal with something, they're ignorant".
A gothic horror yarn in which a man surgically merges another man with a walrus, it also takes a long, ludicrous digression into comedy with a surprise cameo by an outsized star.
Over time, the project mutated into the literary equivalent of its subject: a discontinuous maze, composed of brief insights and digressions, along with quotations that glitter from the pages like wares in a shop window.
Kozol says that in the past he would skip such digressions, but "now it seems to be the moments of digression I remember with most interest later on".
