I’m reading Cloud Atlas. I like some of the stories, others are just OK, but I’m willing to read through and get the whole experience.
Well, I was willing, until I hit the central tale, told completely in dialect. Soon I found myself skimming through, looking for plot points, and finally I gave up and read a synopsis of the chapter. I just can’t wade through this:
for a whole chapter. It hurts my eyeballs and my brain.
I understand the motivation, but for me, the speaker’s style could be conveyed through folksy words (of actual English) and simple sentence structure. I really, really hate trying to decipher a phonetic rendering of patois. And all those apostrophes just make me shudder. Would it not be sufficient to write “Old Georgie’s path and mine crossed more times than I’m comfy remembering”?
I remember the last time I tried to read *Dracula *I stalled out on the dialog with the old man at the docks for the same reason. I have the feeling it was meant to be hilarious, but it’s just fucking annoying to me.
Maybe I’m just too lazy a reader. I know Cloud Atlas is supposed to be challenging to the reader, and that’s part of its charm. But when does “challenging the reader” cross over into hostility to the reader? Maybe I could slog through these passages for a class, but for pleasure reading I just won’t put myself through it.
Yes, I found the dialects made Huckleberry Finn almost unreadable to me back in high school. There’s no need to have 8 different spellings of the same word in the same book, imho.
It depends. It can be an effective way of getting into the feel of a place if done properly. I liked Heinlein’s “lunar” dialect in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and fell into it pretty easily. I didn’t have an issue with it in Huckleberry Finn.
But I absolutely hate it when I can’t make sense of a character unless I sound out every single word. The worst offender I’ve come across is the original printing of Joel Chandler Harris’ Uncle Remus. Reading it was torture.
I had trouble with Huckleberry Finn when I tried to read it as a kid, after reading and liking Tom Sawyer, but when I got older, the dialect wasn’t that much of an obstacle, and Twain does it pretty readably once you get into the groove. There are some writers from around that era who are much, much worse, like Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus stories, or Finley Peter Dunne’s Mr. Dooley writings—I lack the patience to read that stuff. I was surprised that the OP’s example was from a modern book; I thought that sort of thing had gone out of fashion.
I like to get lost in a book and that can’t happen if I need to sound out every word and try to decide what it’s supposed to mean and then have to put the whole sentence together afterward, again and again and again.
Thudlow, there are lots of modern books which do this, from A Clockwork Orange to Riddley Walker to a lot of Toni Morrison. We even did a thread about them a few years ago.
Huckleberry Finn works because Twain was a genius. There aren’t many of those.
Dear God, I hate this so, so much. Maybe it just means I can’t recognize the poetry of language or something. But Cloud Atlas, Huck Finn, Their Eyes Were Watching God, parts of The Red Badge of Courage . . . it’s hugely distracting. I sometimes had to read long stretches of dialogue out loud to figure out what the hell anyone was talking about. The only reason I got through it in Cloud Atlas was because I knew the book was going to be going back to readable prose after about eighty pages.
It depends on if I know the dialect. Most Southern American dialects don’t give me a problem, or if they do I can just say them and I figure it out pretty quickly. Scottish dialects stop me cold. I have no earthly idea how to pronounce half of those words and I just end up skimming. For some reason I have no problem with Yorkshire. I guess it’s because one of my favorite books growing up was The Secret Garden which is almost a primer on Yorkshire dialect. I can breeze through Wuthering Heights with no problem now thanks to TSG.
The only time the dialect stuff annoys me is when it doesn’t read to me like it’s supposed to sound (e.g. a character is supposed to be Irish, but if I sound out the dialect writing it sounds like Martian).
The bit that really annoys me is when an author gets so into writing dialect that they take words that properly aren’t spelled the way they’re said and spell them the way that most people say them.
Irvine Welsh uses Scottish dialect for much of the dialogue in his books, and I enjoy it. I do have some friends who vehemently disagree with me on it, though.
Overall, if the dialect has a sense of realism or at least seems to be internally consistent (not being Scottish, I have no idea if Mr. Welsh is accurate or not, but he’s consistent in usage), I tend to like it. My one exception would be the folksy dialect James Whitcomb Riley used in his stories and poems… can’t stand that.
One thing that really bugs me about spelling out dialects is when it’s used inconsistently among characters. For example, if you read a book with a character from Mississippi, one from Pennsylvania, and one from California, but only the character from Mississippi is having their dialogue spelled out phoenetically. Not only does it come off as condescending, but it inadvertently holds up the other characters’ way of speaking as the “normal” way. After all, people from those two states have their own quirky way of pronouncing certain things Why aren’t those words being spelled out phonetically? But because people more strongly associate the South with a particular accent (and probably because the author is not from the South), they feel the need to practically hold up a sign and say, “Hey, this person is from the South! See, that’s why he’s talking funny!”
I don’t like it at all. I prefer when the author makes a brief mention (preferably from the POV of a character who doesn’t share the accent) noting that the person has a strong accent and then just leaves it to your imagination.
As an instance that comes to mind, in the book Island in the Sea of Time, one of the 1200 BC locals named Isketerol has just learned to speak English and has a strong accent. Rather than write out everything he says with this accent, Stirling briefly mentions that when he says “That would take years,” it comes out sounding like “Dat wud tikka yee-ars,” but writes the rest of his dialogue conventionally.
I hate it so much and it makes me want to throw a book out the window. I feel actual rage at this. I stopped reading Tai-Pan because major plot sensitive page long conversations were in pigdin. It was awful and I was furious. They’d be talking about murders and horrid things all in the “You no likee” type of format.
I posted a paragraph here once, nearly incomprehensible. I will never try to read the book again.
Here I found one:
“Cow chillo out! Plenty quick-quick, savvy?” Struan said.
“You want cow chillo, heya? Cow chillo plenty good bed jig-jig. Two dollar never mind,” the girl called out.
Cow chillo means young woman. Every major dialogue between Chinese and American characters was like that. It’s pretentious and it’s annoying.
Robert Louis Stevenson’s Thrawn Janet (there’s an online version of it here) is a really horrifying story. It took about the fourth time I read it and could actually understand what happened in the story to recognize it as such, though. I think the Scottish dialect adds to the overall impact of the story, but it’s a lot of work to get through it.
It rarely bothers me, as long as it’s not completely impenetrable. It can be used effectively to develop a character, or to show changes in a character, but it’s rarely necessary. For the most part, handling it the way RikWriter describes is fine: establish that the character has an accent or dialect different from other characters, then only reference it if it’s relevant.
Actually, in the same book, the Sonmi chapters arguably use a dialect. But it didn’t piss me off, because the odd words were used sparingly enough that they gave you a feel for the society/character without intruding unduly. It didn’t bother me at all to read “lite,” and “thru” because they were comprehensible while really supporting the whole corporate culture idea. It took me a few pages to realize that “Xultation” was “exultation,” and so forth, but it was easy to plug in to all the “ex-” words from then on. But the Zachry language was just too dense!
I also prefer the technique of describing the person’s accent, then writing their words in normal English.