She goes for the imitative fallacy with gusto: the novel's jerky, high-strung, inept and self-conscious narration, peppered with footnotes, footnoted footnotes, interjections and long digressions, is disjointed, exhausting and unnecessary.
Borges was famously a fan of footnotes; a footnote to a body of footnoted works seems like a devious sort of tribute, almost Lex Luthor-like.
("The footnotes! The footnotes!").
Aristotle, Plotinus, Ruskin, Tolstoy and of course Carl Gustav Jung are all summoned to give witness; there are footnotes, and footnotes on footnotes.
The whole point of paying for a newspaper is that you want information that slides down easily and quickly, without footnotes, obscure references and footnotes to footnotes.
The fresh one, she told me afterward, felt a little lonely by comparison: she missed the meta-conversation running in the margins, the sense of another consciousness co-filtering D.F.W.'s words, the footnotes to the footnotes to the footnotes to the footnotes.
As for translators... "My Icelandic translator even asked whether he could add footnotes to my footnotes," exclaimed Somoza.
This lack is amplified by a surfeit of information about peripheral subjects and individuals; this is a book in which, metaphorically speaking, the footnotes have footnotes.
I'll take Grafton and Zerby's word for it that John Hodgson's mighty "History of Northumberland," published a century and a half later, is at least worth flipping through for its footnotes on footnotes on footnotes, including one traversing 165 pages.
There are footnotes within footnotes; some text is sideways, upside down or even backwards; and one footnote (part of which can be seen inside the blue box in the example) reads as if it were tunneling through the pages.
