Mark Leach doesn’t claim his 2.5 million-word novel is the world’s greatest -- only the longest.
The Texas writer is making a run at the record books with "Marienbad My Love," the story of a Christ-haunted filmmaker who believes he is called on by God to bring about the end of the world by producing a science fiction-themed pastiche of the 1961 French New Wave classic, "Last Year at Marienbad."
“If you’re going to destroy the world, you really ought to do it big,” Leach said. “Two and half million words seems about right.”
"Marienbad My Love" dwarfs Marcel Proust’s "In Search of Lost Time," a 1.5-million-
“I’ve always been rather enamored with the story of Madison Cooper,” Leach said. “He was a millionaire bachelor in Waco, where my mother was raised. I grew up hearing stories about how he spent 11 years writing his book in secret. He supposedly kept his notes on a paper window shade in the room where he did his writing. If someone unexpectedly entered the room, he’d quickly raise the shade to hide his work.”
By no means does Leach believe his record will stand unchallenged. Some list makers insist the world’s longest novel in English is actually Henry Darger's "In the Realms of the Unreal," an unpublished, 15,000-page fantasy manuscript that is believed to have a word count in the millions. In 2007, Richard Grossman announced plans to publish "Breeze Avenue," a multi-author, 3 million-page novel with an estimated word count of more than 1 billion.
But Leach is untroubled by the competition. He is hedging his bet by also challenging the records for longest sentence with a 510,000-word creation and longest book title, a rambling, 6,700-word entry that begins “Marienbad My Love in the Ruins of the dreams and memories…” Those records are currently claimed by writer Nigel Tomm, whose book "The Blah Story, Volume 4" consists of one sentence containing 469,375 words, and a college principal in India who wrote a book on the actor Daniel Radcliffe with a title of 1,022 words.
