Review: Djibouti

Djibouti by Elmore Leonard

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



I was wanting to dig in and figure out Elmore Leonard's dialog, and it's really tricky in this one. I had a hard time finding the right voices and rhythms for Xavier, who seemed to be one of the vital voices here. I'm trying [b:Tishomingo Blues|147210|Tishomingo Blues|Elmore Leonard|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1172184937s/147210.jpg|2539638] next to see how it goes.

The thing is that without an 'accent' and a real voice in the head, it's difficult to catch onto the ellipsis he relies on so heavily. He tries to portray in writing how people really talk with elisions and omissions of sounds and even whole words, and he writes much of it this way. Unfortunately, he does it mostly by omitting words, not by eliding within words. So the syntax is difficult to figure out until you get an internal voice to go with each character.



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