Making a Mess of Marienbad
The French New Wave film classic Last Year at Marienbad has spawned a book that will take the average reader at least that long to get through it.
Tuesday, July 8, 2008 at 1:40 PM
By FilmStew Staff
It’s unclear whether the late French novelist and screenwriter Alain Robbe-Grillet, who passed away in February at the age of 85, would have been flattered or insulted by the homage being currently paid to him by would-be Texas writer Mark Leach. But in just a few months since the latter first unveiled his tome Marienbad My Love in March, it has grown four-fold from its voluminous starting length to an astonishing 12.6 million words.
Leach’s book, begun in the late 1980’s, tells the story of a whacked out desert island filmmaker who is convinced that he must bring about the end of the world by producing a new sci-fi film version of the 1961 French New Wave classic Last Year at Marienbad. The movie earned Robbe-Grillet an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay.
“If you’re going to destroy the world, you really ought to do it big,” suggests Leach, who is making his opus available via the Internet as a free (and massive) download. “When I released the first edition of Marienbad My Love, 2.5 million words seemed plenty long for a 21st century Apocalypse. But the ideas kept coming, and the story kept growing. Now I feel like I'm just getting warmed up.”
Given the fact that the Guinness Book of World Records lists the 1.5 million-word Marcel Proust work In Search of Lost Time as the longest English-language novel, one would assume that unless Leach fails to meet certain criteria as an author, he will soon be usurping another Frenchman. If not, he can perhaps still take comfort in the fact that his tale contains two other hard-to-beat milestones: a 4,400,000-letter noun and a three million-word sentence.