Esi Edugyan Writing Style Analysis

The more I read Esi Edugyan’s award winning novel Half-Blood Blues, the more frustrated I get with it. Edugyan’s writing style may very well be the definition of style over content in literary form. This issue is mostly generated from the novel’s nonlinear form and the intense over use of unwarranted descriptions. My first major issue with the novel is its purposeless nonlinearity. It really doesn’t have that Pulp Fictionesque style that allows each timeline to flow naturally into the next, causing the writing to feel very choppy. Each timeline change is a rather jarring hard cut without any leeway for important information, this leads to an inability to fully grasp specific character interactions due to missing information that will only be made available later on in the novel. It really feels like the chapters where arranged in a random order, without any rhyme or reason. This arrangement style is rather perplexing because it really doesn’t enhance the novel in any way, other …show more content…
Both the supporting cast and the setting of the novel are completely over shadowed by Edugyan’s intense over use of descriptions. For example, Edugyan has created multiple vivid sequences of the band playing music but we never get a feeling for the culture that would have surrounded it, which is rather disappointing because there is so much that could have been done here. Another example of this over shadowing can be found by analyzing the supporting cast of the novel. The reader is continuously subjected to descriptions of their body and facial features, but these characters are never given any defining traits or any semblance of a personality, causing them to be both completely forgettable and interchangeable. This issue becomes extremely prevalent later on in the novel due to the fact that it is rather difficult to understand the motivations of personality-less