I'm playing devil's advocate again.  This comes, like the last one, from Passive Voice who cites the Opinionator.  In this case I agree.  I like the sentence he cites very much indeed.  It contains everything the glance out of the window has conveyed to the observer.

 

"I cannot help but marvel at Angela Carter’s crammed sentences and how, for all their weight and violent grandeur, they sustain a kind of perpetual motion. Take this single line from “Nights at the Circus” where Carter gives us the startling view from a trans-Siberian train:

Outside the window, there slides past that unimaginable and deserted vastness where night is coming on, the sun declining in ghastly blood-streaked splendour like a public execution across, it would seem, half a continent, where live only bears and shooting stars and the wolves who lap congealing ice from water that holds within it the entire sky."

 

 

 

 

 

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I'll play.

Though I generally argue for clarity (easy to read), this elongated sentence does paint quite the picture. I can see everything, as you said IJ. The words seem like brush strokes in a Monet.

That said, I'd still run my red pencil across "it would seem," and I hope the deserted vastness of half a continent (nice!) plays a role in the story.

Good imagery, but I had to work just a tad to hard to follow along.

I typically don't go any longer or more ornate than this (from my WIP set inside the mansion of a wealthy hoarder): 

In the great hall we passed a great pyramid of rolled up rugs, a white sea of draped furniture, an island chain of grand and baby grand pianos—seven in total, I think—and a regiment of grandfather clocks about forty members strong and ticking out of synchrony. It was materialism run amok. It was the garbled language of the mad. It was virtually a walk inside an unhinged mind.

:)  Now you know, Eric, you could have squeezed the loose sentences in also.

It's beautifully written, but I had to work to read it, which would take me out of the story, since this sentence forces me to remember I'm reading. The same thing could have been accomplished in two or three sentences, giving the eye a chance to catch up. 

Try breaking it up.  It doesn't work.  The rhythm is gone.  It becomes staccato instead of long and vast like the scene and the concept

You're right; it doesn't. (Damn it.) I still think reading a whole book of sentences like that would become tiresome, but i have to agree, I don't see how to change that one without diminishing the effect.

Surely the book isn't made of sentences as tortuous as this one because that would diminish the effect here. Surely there are normal length sentences bookending it.

Also, there is only so much metaphor and simile--no matter how excellent--per page before that too becomes tiresome.

I expect you're quite right.  And the same goes for imagery.  I don't know the book, though I'm tempted to read it.

I'm tempted too!

Well, I've driven across Saskatchewan, so I can imagine some pretty deserted vastness. But "blood-streaked splendour like a public execution," is very evocative.

 

 

I looked out the window and watched the sun go down.

Very non-evocative.

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