Jones is a knotty-sentence teller of family folklore, Diaz a Bellowian maximalist crashing into English via Santa Domingo, Earley an elegant southerner in the vein of Peter Taylor.
When faced with a knotty problem, an overwritten sentence, or indeed a spiky piece of driftwood – I do my best to humbel it.
But at a panel on Tuesday, the translator, Dai Congrong of Fudan University, who spent nearly 10 years wrestling with Joyce's runaway sentences and knotty coinages, confessed that even she didn't fully understand the book.
Lawyers I talk to say Gu may end up with a fate that is common in knotty Chinese cases: a death sentence that is suspended (i.e., never carried out), on the basis of mental instability.
Their intertwined tale, which toward its end sings praises of the intricate Book of Kells, is knotty with words like "pubococcygeal," sentences like "According to Margenau's theory, human consciousness could be compared to a field of probabilities in a Fock space, defined as a direct sum of Hilbert spaces," and pages of tendentious analogy between quantum physics and biological processes.
It's dramatic, for sure, but in a measured, nuanced, knotty way, like a long, complex sentence with many digressive clauses and a logic sometimes hard to follow.
He plays a paedophile returning home after a 12-year prison sentence, and the film's knotty script allows him to give a layered performance that veers from creepy to tragic without ever resorting to simply monstrous.
With severe overcrowding, abuse allegations and controversial sentencing laws, California's prison system is a knotty political topic that often appears on the ballot.
Other knotty issues abounded.
The Look Knotty by nature.
