'Overwritten'

How often do you use this, or how useful is it to use as dismissal?

I was thinking about it in connection to Lezama Lima's Paradiso (a little known Cuban novel). I wind up thinking about its pyrotechnic turns of phrase once a day or so, but I felt it obscured its knowledge of the world, but not its pleasures of it. I don't know if I can expand anymore till a re-read, which won't happen for a while.

As I don't have a copy (had to give it back to the library) I can't quote either so I'll hand it to the rest of you to cite examples/experiences. Lima was a poet and essayist and I'd like to spend way more time reading and thinking about him (as much is not translated/out of print anyway), but I can't so this will have to do.

pedant alert: paradiso is a very well known Cuban novel, just not very well known in the english speaking world.

ha! But how well is it known in Cuba? Wasn't it suppressed by Castro for its discussions of homosexuality?

But yeah I'm sure it has a higher profile in the Spanish speaking world.

In Julio Cortazar's 'Around the Day in Eighty Worlds' there's a praising essay on this book.

is this basically a charge that faults a writer for violation of decorum, the principle that the style should fit the matter? (and, maybe in extension of that, that the style should fit the significance of the book, since even on a serious matter, overmuch style would grate in a book that had little of interest to say about it?)

Cortazar had a role in getting the novel published in English I think.

Its an odd one but I do think the overabundance of language obscured the matter instead of orienting and strengthening. Its a v fine line. Usually I'm all for this, in that he was taking a risk, and how many writers do that?

It can be valid criticism, but it's hugely subjective. Many readers obviously get far more enjoyment from baroque prose than I - one reader's "orienting and strengthening" is another's "obscuring the matter".

I did finish and got into it for good periods, but it did hit a nerve - hence the afterthought and thread.

Fashions in writing come and go. Highly ornate language often comes into favor at times when matters of substance appear to be settled, so all that remains to be done is a bit of refinement and embroidery, or else when such matters are determined outside of the public sphere, so writing and reading just pass the time, as if we were all reduced to doodling on napkins.

I tend to steer clear of 'overwritten' to describe things. If it's tempting me, it's usually something I want to be more precise about, I guess a writer not entirely in control of their style – piling up unsurprising adjectives or muddling images or hammering at you paratactically or choosing out-of-the-way words with no gain in meaning or euphony are the things that would draw me to it: I like density, but mimicking density without thought, feeling, observation or precision leads to varieties of melodrama and woolliness.