I love one beautifully digressive habit in The Shadow of the Wind (2001). Carlos Ruiz Zafón enjoys tossing off short glimpses of fantastic tales, micro-micro-Gothic-narratives worthy of fuller exploration. They get tied up and shut down right away, never returned to.
Here are a few samples:
"People love to gossip, don't they? But not me. All I know is that once Julian told the kids in the building that he had a sister only he could see. He said she came out of mirrors as if she were made of thing air and that she lived with Satan himself in a palace at the bottom of a lake. My Isabelita had nightmares for a whole month." (119)
Fun kids! But we don't see that sister ever again.
I... was about to turn down the avenue when I looked up and saw Tibidabo Mountain awakening behind the clouds of gauze. Suddenly I felt like taking the funicular up the hill to visit the old amusement park crowning its top and wander among its merry-go-rounds and the eerie automaton halls, but I had promised to be back in the bookshop on time. (147)
Naturally we never return to that steampunkish hilltop.
The dreams began with that mysterious fever, which some blamed on the sting of a huge red scorpion that appeared in the house one day and was never seen again, and others on the evil designs of a mad nun who crept into houses at night to poison children and who, years later, was to be garroted reciting the Lord's Prayer backward with her eyes popping out of their sockets, while a red cloud spread over the town and discharged a storm of dead cockroaches. (260)
Neither nun nor scorpion reappear. But what a sentence!
This habit reminds me of Kilgore Trout's one-paragraph novel-stories. Among other things. Is there a term for it?
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