“The Fifty Year Sword” is a short story by Mark Z. Danielewski. It is a rather shallow book by his standards as there is only one story within a story, as opposed to a far more complex nesting structure.
The tale is rather dark and has a component of horror
without getting all too graphic.
More so than anything and the reason I love books by Mark Z.
Danielewski is that he writes books, not texts. What I mean by this is that his
books are illustrated and the text is specifically formatted and oriented to
help tell the story. You have to turn your head or turn the book in order to
read the words. There was also an instance where I was not sure if an
illustration was showing through the page (pages are of thick paper) or if it
was a printed faded version on the back.
“The Fifty Year Sword” is the first book I have read where
it is all dialogue, no place setting or narrator to speak of, and the
characters are not identified by name, rather they are identified by different
color quotation marks, sometimes quoting each other. Each character is written
as speaking with their own level of sophistication, dialect, vernacular, and
accents. They often finish each other’s sentences with tone and accent changing
as it goes.
This is a wonderful short read and I would encourage other
people to try Danielewski if they have not done so yet.
