“The dreams of those of us without a gift for narrative often show great narrative flair. Here, the sleeper is a linguistics textbook, the dream its payload of example sentences: words which were meant to be looked at but never into. Is this the story Language itself needed to tell, or a tale hidden in plain view by a linguist too shy to speak? We can never know if the troubled and self-questioning protagonists of “Unnecessarily Emphatic” are anything more than projections of our own troubled self-questioning. It’s all the more moving for that – it’s our story, a human document willed into being by sheer force of hope.”
Peter Manson
