13 NOVEMBER 2004, Page 38

Marathon monologue

From James Young Sir: Proust's 937-word sentence (Letters, 6 November) is laconic compared with James Joyce's effort at the end of Ulysses. Molly Bloom's 'stream of consciousness' consists of some 22,000 words; moreover it contains not a single punctuation mark apart from the full stop after the final Yes.

James Young

London N1