Current Issue + contents + contributors + thanks News Next Issue Submit Links About Contact     Is there a perfect one-sentence novel? Candidates might be Vanessa Place's Dies: A Sentence or Thomas Bernhard's On The Mountain. Then there is my own When Stein Eriksen Ran Over My Skis. These last two achieve their one-sentence status by ‘withholding the period,’ mine for three pages, Bernhard's for 120. But there is, to my knowledge, no collection of one-sentence, or one-line, novels. Perhaps the closest thing to it is an anthology of very short tales edited by Jorge Borges and Bioy Casares, Cuentos Breves y Extraordinarios [Brief and Extraordinary Tales, 1955]. My own choice for the perfect one-sentence ‘novel’ (if such can exist) is Augusto Monterroso's Dinosaur: Cuando despertó, el dinosaurio todavía estaba allí. [When h/s awoke, the dinosaur was still there]. The ‘novel’ has been praised by such writers as Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco for its economical beauty and mystery. It is widely studied in Italy and South America and the Italian writer, Italo Calvino, took it the standard by which all other one-sentence tales should be measured (Six Memos For The Next Millenium). Dinosaur has what I want to call here ‘pregnant brevity.’ This means, on the whole, that it gives birth to multiple meanings. First, we are not sure who woke up. It could be a ‘he,’ a ‘she,’ an ‘it’ or the dinosaur itself. Secondly, we can't pin down what kind of ‘waking’ it is. It could be from sleep, from a daydream, from fainting on seeing the dinosaur or from a drunken stupor--in which case the dinosaur might be a hangover. Moreover, these ‘meanings’ are all stable under different kinds of syntactical transformations and word substitutions. For example, instead of ‘Cuando despertó, el dinosaurio todavía estaba allí,’ the original version, we can write ‘Allí despertó, cuando el dinosaurio todavía estaba,’ ‘Cuando se despertó, el dinosaurio seguia allí,’ or ‘Cuando se despertó el dinosaurio, todavía estaba allí.’ Umberto Eco's Italian translation, ‘Quando si sveglió, il dinosauro era ancora lí,’ also preserves the original meaning. Furthermore, the meaning of the ‘novel’ can be enriched by tracing the history of some of its words. ‘Todavía,’ for example, is a compound of two Latin based words, ‘totus’ [all or every] and ‘via’ [way]. Similarly with ‘estaba.’ It comes from the early Latin, ‘sto’ (or ‘sta’), with the general meaning of ‘stand.’ With these associations in mind, we can then propose a rougher, but perhaps richer, meaning: ‘the dinosaur was everywhere [in every way] standing there.’ But, it seems fair to say, ‘novels’--especially one-sentence ones--mean more than what they ‘say’ to just one reader. Or, to put the matter another way, what would you have to imagine for this particular ‘novel’ to be true in all situations? So, in conclusion, I would like to pose the question: what does the dinosaur truly represent for you? Email the author with your thoughts on this or any other matter about to the 'dinosaur,' to Gene Washington Contribute to public debate on this or any other matter about the 'dinosaur,' by emailing Harbinger. Top Next article Next article by this author