the world's longest novel

Neighborsgo.com

 

2 March 2008

 

Mark Leach doesn’t claim his 2.5 million-word novel is the world’s greatest, only the longest.

The Coppell, Texas, writer is making a run at the record books with “Marienbad My Love,” the story of a Christ-haunted filmmaker who believes he is called on by God to bring about the end of the world by producing a science fiction-themed pastiche of the 1961 French New Wave classic, “Last Year at Marienbad.”

“If you’re going to destroy the world, you really ought to do it big,” Leach said. “Two and half million words seems about right.”

“Marienbad My Love” is a massive work by almost any measure. It dwarfs Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time,” a 1.5-million-word opus that currently holds the “Guinness Book of Records” title as the longest novel in English. “Marienbad My Love" is more than twice as long as L. Ron Hubbard’s “Mission Earth,” which is widely regarded as the world’s longest science-fiction novel at 1.2 million words, and Madison Cooper’s 1.1-million-word “Sironia, Texas,” which made news in 1952 when TIME Magazine wrote that it was “apparently the longest novel by an American writer ever to be published.”

“I’ve always been rather enamored with the story of Madison Cooper,” Leach said. “He was a millionaire bachelor in Waco, where my mother was raised. I grew up hearing stories about how he spent 11 years writing his book in secret. He supposedly kept his notes on a paper window shade in the room where he did his writing. If someone unexpectedly entered the room, he’d quickly raise the shade to hide his work.”

Leach began working on “Marienbad My Love” about 20 years ago, when he and his wife moved to Coppell. In fact, the fictional town of Strangers Rest is largely based on circa 1988 Coppell.
"Back then Coppell was much smaller than it is today, but the development had already begun,” he said. “We’d drive past a new housing subdivision, then go to the post office and see somebody in boots and spurs. One afternoon we actually had somebody ride up in our front yard on horseback."
By no means does Leach believe his record will stand unchallenged. Some list makers insist the world’s longest novel in English is actually Henry Darger's “In the Realms of the Unreal,” an unpublished, 15,000-page fantasy manuscript that is believed to have a word count in the millions. In 2007, Richard Grossman announced plans to publish “Breeze Avenue,” a multi-author, 3 million-page novel with an estimated word count of more than 1 billion.

But Leach is untroubled by the competition. He is hedging his bet by also challenging the records for longest sentence with a 510,000-word creation and longest book title, a rambling, 6,700-word entry that begins “Marienbad My Love in the Ruins of the dreams and memories…” Those records are currently claimed by writer Nigel Tomm, whose book "The Blah Story, Volume 4" consists of one sentence containing 469,375 words, and a college principal in India who wrote a book on the actor Daniel Radcliffe with a title of 1,022 words.


A free ebook download of "Marienbad My Love" is available at marienbadmylove.com.

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Comments
Oscar Martinez
Date Posted: Mar 3, 2008 at 9:12 PM CST
Don't know about the world's longest novel, but I seem to recall "Last Year at Marienbad" being one of the longest movies ever - the long shots of the empty ballrooms, the constant references to the balustrade ... ah, it all comes flooding back in vivid art-film black and white ...