Rafael Sabatini, Scaramouche

Swashbuckling prose! After reading a few newspaper and magazine articles I immediately pick up Rafael Sabatini’s Scaramouche and read one or two chapters. Journalese is so turgid and cheap that I need a good dose of a good prose to balance my day. Writers today should do the same and learn the elements of vivid prose. Sabatini’s Scaramouche is a tale of the French Revolution─a veritable page turner. It never lets up until we are done with it; even despite the fact that we already know the outcome of the revolution. The Baroness Orczy's The Scarlet Pimpernel is another great book about the French Revolution; however, the prose doesn't come near the quality of Sabatini's Scaramouche. Although the Baroness Orczy's writing is lucid, it is much inferior because it lacks sentence variety. Although one of the main strands of the novel is revenge─a psychological theme to be sure─it doesn’t read as a psychological treatise as D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers does. While writers like Henry James, Don DeLillo, and Jonathan Franzen lull you to sleep with their bromides, Sabatini energizes and electrifies the reader. What is Sabatini’s secret? A good deal of it is the sentence openers—which are never ever duplicated─and a timely use of the Absolute. If you wish to be a fair writer, then you owe it to yourself and your readers to master the different forms of the Absolute. These two techniques will levitate first and then make your prose soar to new heights. Do not understimate the power of grammatical constructs to thrust the narrative drive with jet-engine power. Once we understand the power of sentence openers and the role of absolute phrases, we can then see why the Baroness Orczy's novel is so inferior to Sabatini's--she was unfamiliar with them! In my estimation Winston Churchill, Edward Gibbon, and Rafael Sabatini are the unsurpassed masters of the English language. What a pleasure it is to read well balanced sentences. Augustine, City of God Austen J, Pride and Prejudice Austen J, "Marriage Proposals and Me" Austen J, Emma Borges, The Aleph C. Bronte, Jane Eyre Burroughs E,Tarzan Cervantes, Don Quijote Chaucer, Wife of Bath Coelho P,The Alchemist Coyle H, They Are Soldiers Dante, New Life Dickens C, David Copperfield Dostoevsky, Crime&Punishment ConanDoyle,Hound of Baskervilles Dubner S, Superfreakonomics DuMaurier D, Rebecca Ellis B. E. American Psycho Fitzgerald S, Great Gatsby Flaubert G, Madame Bovary Fleming I,Doctor No Freud S, Leonardo Da Vinci Friedan B, Feminine Mystique GarciaMarquez, Of Love & OtherDemons GarciaMarquez,OneHundredYrs Guerrero M,ThePoison Pill Grass G, The Tin Drum Harris T, Hannibal Rising Heidegger M,House of Being Ishiguro K, Remains of The Day Johnson S,Rasselas Kafka,Metamorphosis Kosinski J, The Painted Bird Lee H,To Kill a Mockingbird McBain Ed,Gutter and Grave Murakami H,Wind-Up Bird Chronicle Nabokov V, Lolita Meyer, S, Twilight Ortega,Dehumanization of Art Poe E A, Gordon Pym Prose F, Reading Like a Writer Rushdie S,Midnight Children Sabatini R, Scaramouche Spark M, Prime of Miss Brodie Stendhal, Red and Black Sterne L,Tristram Shandy Stevenson R, Dr.Jekyll & Mr.Hyde Stoker B, Dracula Thackeray W,History of Pendennis Tolstoy L, Anna Karenina Trollope A, Autobiography Unamuno M, Tragic Sense of Life Voltaire, Candide Webb J, Fields of Fire Wharton E, The House of Mirth Woolf V, To The Lighhouse The secrets of 'no-doze' prose: Mary Duffy's Sentence Openers Image via Wikipedia Lindsey Vonn Back to main page

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