Quote:
Originally Posted by usuallee
I just read Louise Erdrich's The Round House. Pretty good book. But no quotation marks were used to denote dialogue. As far as I can determine, Cormac McCarthy started doing this and now lots of literary authors are mimicking the trend.
To me, there is no stylistic reason to omit quotation marks, except to self-consciously announce an author's intention that This Is A Literary Work. I find it utterly pretentious. Your thoughts....
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Charlie Huston does this (and I think he wrote books without before Cormac, but I'd have to go look.)
Annoyed the bezeebers out of me. I don't mind when authors do things to kind of "test" things or be original, but there was no earthly idea to not use quotes. Sure it's a style thing, but it slowed my reading down. The author also has a lot of cursing. Sure, it was probably realistic, but curse words are actually just a bunch of extra words. So between that and the quotes, I think it cut my reading speed in half and upped my annoyance by double.
