CautiousPlatypusBB
u/CautiousPlatypusBB
Feed options
Hot
New
Top
View
Card
Compact
Ah yes, I didn't notice your username was different. It's not about not writing. You can write something extraordinary regardless. I like writing. I was just saying that the literary thing is not accessible to everybody in the same way. Of course, one cannot diminish someone's achievements regardless, as you said, even if they are institutional.
Of course. I agree with what you are saying, mostly. I just think that "the mountain is you" assumes "you" is a free floating consciousness somewhere in a meritocratic void but this is not so. "you" includes all the institutional pain and suffering inflicted on you as well and so it is a bit dishonest to claim you are there because of you and not because you're mostly just lucky. You can be talented, which I am sure you are, getting a residency and all that but one must turn the criticism inward once in a while, don't you think?
The Mannheim translation is much better imo. It is far more accurate to how Celine is actually trying to sound, loose and ranting and contradictory. It's also actually funny. HP Marks makes him sound like every other early 20th century French writer translated to English. I've read 5 Celine novels so far and Ralph Mannheim's translations are truly incredible. I always found them good but only understood just how much better Mannheim is compared to others when I read "Conversations with Professor Y", which is translated by some guy named Stanford Luce and I noticed just how bad and unfunny the translation was, how the translator did not understand Celine's punctuation or the always changing tone and voice of his prose.
I like keeping a record of everything that I've read and my thoughts and opinions on it. I don't see why you wouldn't want to do this. Why should you just move on from everything? I don't subscribe to consumptive nihilism. One should want to tell people their thoughts and opinions when a piece of art has profoundly affected their life. This is what is normal OP. If you find yourself totally unmoved by the novels you are reading, you are not reading the right books.
While I have not read My Brilliant Friend, is that really true? I think most, almost all contemporary writing is very direct and to the point. The kind of flowery writing Bukowski was talking about (maybe Fitzgerald) is not really a thing anymore, is it? I can't think of a single contemporary novelist who writes ornate prose.
I have been wanting to read some literary criticism but other than essays by famous writers (Gass, for example), are there any contemporary blogs that do this? I don't like watching book reviews or reading about a book I haven't read yet. I want something that tries to analyze a novel using unconventional, non-moralistic frameworks without "hot takes" or any kind of sensationalism, something almost academic but written in clear, lucid language.
I read this LitHub blog titled - "Thomas Pynchon has been warning us about american fascism for a long time". It has some 4k upvotes on . I assumed it would be good criticism. In the entire article, the writer mentions zero plot points from any Pynchon novel and absolutely no analysis, not even surface level. 95% of the article is him discussing upcoming films or other writers' work using wikipedia summaries. The one sentence he does say about Gravity's rainbow is wrong. He says GR's "bad guy" is "Captain Blicero" which is pretty bizarre to me. Blicero is a mystic and a fascist and yes, he does a lot of horrible shit and is insane but clearly, he has his purpose. He fully believes in the nihilism of his world and as Germany collapses, so does he. In a way, Blicero represents the end consciousness of War which with its last flight (quite literally) kills you know who. I don't want to spoil it but the Blicero sections always read like a nightmare to me. I don't think there are any "good" or "bad" guys in GR. That to me, is a strange conclusion to come to after reading the book... Maybe Marvy is a racist loser but that's just one. Maybe I got it wrong? Always possible. If anyone's read that article, what do you think? Now to be fair, he also cites a passage from Against the day but I haven't read Against the day so I don't know the context there. Of course, speaking generally, Pynchon's work critiques Capitalism and War and all that. I am not denying that. My point is that the article was poorly written and the content in it almost imbecilic. He could've thoroughly analyzed Blicero's character instead. I would like articles that do that actually.
Anyways, my question is, are there any decent blogs? Pls no podcasts.
Because most men who read books don't buy books from any contemporary novelist. They only read classics or fantasy, or play video games. Books can't keep up in a world of screens anyway. The novel requires long term engagement. Hell, even video games are now losing out to reels and social media lol. Even music has lost to reels. The attention spans keep getting shorter and shorter. I have friends who can't sit through a new wave film
Morality is a framework, yes but morality only forms your entire worldview when you are very young. Separating characters in a novel to good and bad is silly. Without getting into some philosophical debate about whether morality is objective in any sense, do you not see the inanity in criticizing a novel for its treatment of a character? Has nobody ever had a difficult marriage and felt this way? Do you think any human being who does not have perfectly neutral perspectives on absolutely everything is a bad person? People feel slighted and insulted, no?
You could argue that the book is unfair to his wife and doesn't display her intentions and feelings with appropriate complexity, sure, maybe the book is even sexist in this way, but you see, it is not about his wife. No other character gets a portrait of themselves either, not the lying cripple or his advisor or anyone else except John stoner. I mean the book is about him. His inability to do anything with his life. Everything he tries ends in failure including his marriage. Maybe he does blame his wife. Has Joyce carol oates never blamed a man for anything? Why are women above blame? Everyone gets reduced to certain traits in everyone else's mind. Every single novel doesn't have to be In search of lost time.
That's a very funny novel. My review from 2023 is very spoilery so I can't paste it here but I thought it was a caricature of a love story. It is deliberately theatrical and formulaic and the prose is so beautiful. It is a darker version of Tanizaki's Naomi. And btw the title actually means something. I don't wanna spoil it but finish the novel and you'll see.
Everything feels like rage bait nowadays, designed to get your attention over everything else imo. I don't listen to other people talk about novels because most people, from my experience online and irl, cannot function without dichotomies. Everything has to be X but Y. The "but" in the world... very sad. Maybe i am pretentious or maybe i am very intelligent or just too disillusioned, I don't know.
Houellebecq is outdated now. He was good to read before all the reels and onlyfans and respectable pornography. His Whatever has not held up at all. In it he proposes the incel archetype but Houellebecq claims that sexual economy is independent of the financial economy. And how wrong he's been proven by time! His Elementary particles has aged even worse. Frankly, that novel is far too reactionary to age well anyway. The map and the territory, I am surprised you didn't like. I think it's his only work that has held up reasonably well.
Agree with your comment on Middlemarch. To me, the 19th century novels hold up much better. Even Trollop is more of a pleasure to read than most current day novelists. There's less anxiety in them, I feel. It soothes me and calms me.
The beats are terrible. I hate all of them. They are all very annoying personalities too, even if their writing was good I wouldn't like them. They try to emulate Celine somewhat but don't have the humor, wit or insight so all their writing reads very teenagey. They try to emulate Henry miller too but don't have his talent for anecdotes or his singularity of mind.
But that's not what I am saying the point is. Even meaningnlessness can be articulated skillfully and Ishigruo does that. I think it is not fair to the novel to reduce it to the platitudinal territory of "The clones are human too and feel just like us". That territory has been chartered hundreds of times in literature. To me, that seems like a superficial reading.
If anything, I would argue against it. What sort of human being resigns himself to his fate without trying at all? Unless, of course, they are fully conditioned to believe in the meaninglessness of their lives, as the clones are. I thought it was a broader analogy for the construction of meaning in the world. The clones try at being human but ultimately are subservient to whatever is told to them. But I don't really think the clones, to the writer, are clones but rather people. In the novel, he makes a distinction between people and clones but in real life, people act like these clones most of the time no? And besides, what does the writer do with his people? He pushes them into the abyss. The school closes when it does because of financial reasons, not necessarily because of all the "people" that died. We are all subservient to the institutions that guide History. And it isn't like the cloning stops anyway. The mass death and horror continues, only now you don't have to pretend or be "humane".
Now, it has been a long time since I read that book, so I might be being too liberal with my interpretation or misremembering events. Forgive me if so.
A pale view of hills is his best book. It is the only one of his novels which explores the idea that the real story or plot of any novel is not what is written down but rather how the reader feels upon reading it, which in itself is not meaningful in the slightest. It is deeply symbolic, much more than his later works.
Do you think it is worth trying to do something if you already know it won't work, as all of his novels (except An artist of the floating world), almost insist upon the reader?
I mean yes, the characters do try but if they fail, every single time, what is the writer trying to convey to the reader? I think unsuccessful attempts, not vindicated later on by at least some progress, are forgotten by history and end up being quite meaningless in the long run. Of course, in never let me go, the school eventually closes but it would've closed regardless of whether or not the three characters died, so why not not die? What could the writer be insisting on by making the characters silently accept their fate?
I think his thesis is that what humanity exists in the fringes is ultimately stamped out by realizations that it doesn't really "exist" at all. Take Klara and the Sun for example, where is this humanity in ending up that way? One seeks to understand goodness and honestness but is ultimately disillusioned not just in the belief of those things, you realize that there is no such thing but also that the very belief in that attempt to believe is naivety, as Klara subtly realizes at the end even if it isn't explicit in the text.
At the end of the remains of the day, what really remains? The narrator has ruined his chances at a "good" life by remaining subservient to a made up morality, which he needed, likely, just to stay alive. Stevens displays remarkable character only for it to cause him nothing but regret. The ending scene where he sits on a bench near the harbour, post world war 2, watching the colored lights come on in the distance, what does it signify if not the ultimate pointlessness of everything one does? That beauty comes to you, that realization comes to you too, maybe right away, as Stevens clearly understood already, even before the defeat of Germany, but even if you unfetter yourself, there is nowhere to go! The handcuffs are required so you don't see the barrenness of the world firsthand! Or at least not, right away. For most people. Of course, I am assuming that disillusionment is some kind of "truth" here but I do think that the novel tries to convey the idea that this too might be just another anchor to hold on to the capricious world.
In Never let me go, the characters literally give up, for there is nothing one can do against the tides of fate but accept that one is going to drown and die.
It has been a while since I last read these books, some 7 or 8 years so my impressions are not as sharp as I would like them to be. Forgive me if this all sounds ridiculous to you! Of course, back then, i did not see life this way but now, many years later, when I recall those novels, this is the only way I can see them.
I think Ishiguro is extremely cynical and nihilistic so idk what to tell you. His prose is restrained and melancholic, yeah but I've never thought of his novels as bittersweet. Similar styles... I honestly don't know, also looking for reccs in that regard, but Ishiguro really engages you at a level that most writers can't imo. I think he has a singular talent for writing dialogue. In A pale view of hills and An artist of the floating world the Japanese (supposedly translated to English) dialogue really reads like a translation. It's incredible.
Melville's The Confidence man. For a book written in 1857, it is very fast paced even though "nothing happens". The central goal of the book seems to be examining human nature in all its contradictions and even the idea of the writer attempting to examine or capture human nature in a fictional novel. I am really enjoying it.
I know the question is a bit clichéd and perhaps, too general to deserve a straight answer but I recently read a book and the writer says how, for americans especially, but of course true for most human beings, at best, art is a mere trinket to decorate your home with. In bourgeois life, the very word "art" carries prestige and that's the only reason why most people have any feelings toward artistic works. And with the proletarianization and democratization of the world, to survive the nihilistic implications of there being no meaning, we ascribe some value, even if entirely made up, to art, literature, everything, usually monteary and democratic. I have many rambling thoughts on this but I wanted to hear what everyone else thinks first.
This is true in a broader sense, I think. Reading in a language other than the one you usually read in, especially if it has a radically different sentence structure will always feel transformative. Even in languages that are almost identical... I've recently started reading exclusively in french and the joy i feel is comparable to how i felt when I was very young and read a Murakami novel for the first time.
There's no mention of any holocaust denial in the book itself. He ignores the subject. One claim i can remember is him saying there are no letters of him mentioning the holocaust or of him being anti Semitic. AFAIK that is true. I could be wrong, of course. And as for the plot to kill Hitler, in the book he claims he couldn't go through with it in the end because the vents were closed or something, towards the end of the war. Could you link me to your source for that one, the guy saying he didn't give him the gas? I'm very interested in this subject. I'll definitely read the Mathhias Schmidt book but one should always be careful reading responses that come out after the writer's death. Have you read Albert Speer: his battle with truth by Gita something? She interviewed him for a long time supposedly.
Inside the third reich by albert speer. Not very accurate but some of the reasons he points to why Germany lost are very interesting, specifically Hitler's obsession with bombing London instead of investing in fighters, his refusal to commit to total war etc. It is also consistently hilarious and very well written.
I read it earlier this year. It is very accesible and consistently mind blowing. Most of book is unrelated vignettes that creep up on you too. If you'd like to talk about the ending and how wonderfully he captures the modern american conservative mindset, we could. I thought it was very funny critique. My favorite section of the book is that old man whose neighbor offers to help him out with yardwork, lawnwork etc. It is stuck to my head. I tell that story at bars. I also really like the long poem section, it starts off a bit boring but once you get into the rhythm it is very beautiful. The only vignette I thought was bad was the "sex" one. But it is, i think, followed by the one where that hitchhiker meets the professor and they talk about the fair and his dead hamster, as well as the one concerning Noam chomsky. It is a very memorable novel. I remember most of the vignettes like movie scenes or like anecdotes from my own life.
I dont disagree with your broader point at all. Nietzsche himself says he prefers the translation that preserves the "tempo" of the language versus accuracy and literalism. My point is that, it is NOT "all credit to the translator". The original writing has to be good for the translation to be good. That's why you see writers like Murakami have a distinct style regardless of the translator. Kafka does not read drastically different in the Muir translation compared to the Schlocken translation.
are they really three times as excellent
This is such a bizarre way of looking at the world. This constant optimizing... I just don't understand it. And length plays a role but not because I want to "enrich" my life "more" but because I like to finish what I start. That's the only reason I haven't started reading The man without qualities. But that's an exception because it is 2000 pages long. For most novels (even The recognitions), length is irrelevant.
John Steinback, Alexander Dumas, Shirley jackson, some Charles dickens (David Copperfield, Great expectations), Patrick rothfuss, Casanova's memoirs, robert heinlein etc. What i probably wouldn't have understood or liked at 14 is even seemingly popular stuff like Murakami. I think you have to be in college at least for that.
I just post here because there's no other book community on reddit that reads literary novels at all but even here, I'm starting to notice the level of discussion keeps going down every day and clichés and platitudes keep getting upvoted. r/truelit is better but it's not as active
I've been reading this book. It is a collection of unrelated short stories. This is from the first story.
One passes imperceptibly from one scene, one age, one life to another. Suddenly, walking down a street, be it real or be it a dream, one realizes for the first time that the years have flown, that all this has passed forever and will live on only in memory; and then the memory turns inward with a strange, clutching brilliance and one goes over these scenes and incidents perpetually, in dream and reverie, while walking a street, while lying with a woman, while reading a book, while talking to a stranger … suddenly, but always with terrific insistence and always with terrific accuracy, these memories intrude, rise up like ghosts and permeate every fiber of one’s being. Henceforward everything moves on shifting levels-our thoughts, our dreams, our actions, our whole life. A parallelogram in which we drop from one platform of our scaffold to another. Henceforward we walk split into myriad fragments, like an insect with a hundred feet, a centipede with soft-stirring feet that drinks in the atmosphere; we walk with sensitive filaments that drink avidly of past and future, and all things melt into music and sorrow; we walk against a united world, asserting our dividedness. All things, as we walk, splitting with us into a myriad iridescent fragments. The great fragmentation of maturity. The great change. In youth we were whole and the terror and pain of the world penetrated us through and through. There was no sharp separation between joy and sorrow: they fused into one, as our waking life fuses with dream and sleep. We rose one being in the morning and at night we went down into an ocean, drowned out completely, clutching the stars and the fever of the day.
And then comes a time when suddenly all seems to be reversed. We live in the mind, in ideas, in fragments. We no longer drink in the wild outer music of the streets-we remember only. Like a monomaniac we relive the drama of youth. Like a spider that picks up the thread over and over and spews it out according to some obsessive, logarithmic pattern. If we are stirred by a fat bust it is the fat bust of a whore who bent over on a rainy night and showed us for the first time the wonder of the great milky globes; if we are stirred by the reflections on a wet pavement it is because at the age of seven we were suddenly speared by a premonition of the life to come as we stared unthinkingly into that bright, liquid mirror of the street. If the sight of a swinging door intrigues us it is the memory of a summer’s evening when all the doors were swinging softly and where the light bent down to caress the shadow there were golden calves and lace and glittering parasols and through the chinks in the swinging door, like fine sand sifting through a bed of rubies, there drifted the music and the incense of gorgeous unknown bodies. Perhaps when that door parted to give us a choking glimpse of the world, perhaps then we had the first intimation of the great impact of sin, the first intimation that here over little round tables spinning in the light, our feet idly scraping the sawdust, our hands touching the cold stem of a glass, that here over these little round tables which later we are to look at with such yearning and reverence, that here, I say, we are to f eel in the years to come the first iron of love, the first stains of rust, the first black, clawing hands of the pit, the bright circular pieces of tin in the streets, the gaunt sootcolored chimneys, the bare elm tree that lashes out in the summer’s lightning and screams and shrieks as the rain beats down, while out of the hot earth the snails scoot away miraculously and all the air turns blue and sulphurous. Here over these tables, at the first call, the first touch of a hand, there is to come the bitter, gnawing pain that gripes at the bowels; the wine turns sour in our bellies and a pain rises from the soles of the feet and the round tabletops whirl with the anguish and the fever in our bones at the soft, burning touch of a hand. Here there is buried legend after legend of youth and melancholy, of savage nights and mysterious bosoms dancing on the wet mirror of the pavement, of women chuckling softly as they scratch themselves, of wild sailors’ shouts, of long queues standing in front of the lobby, of boats brushing each other in the fog and tugs snorting furiously against the rush of tide while up on the Brooklyn Bridge a man is standing in agony, waiting to jump, or waiting to write a poem, or waiting for the blood to leave his vessels because if he advances another foot the pain of his love will kill him.
I think it is more engrossing, better written and also somewhat more juvenile than The haunting of hill house tbh. Some of the prose is gorgeous. I like this sentence a lot.
"I thought that we had somehow not found our way back correctly through the night, that we had somehow lost ourselves and come back through the wrong gap in time, or the wrong door, or the wrong fairy tale."
The despair at having surrendered vast periods of your life to words on a page... regret is something that accumulates over time for me. Whatever I do is bad and wrong. I've been reading novels for like 6 years on and off and my happiest time in life was when I wasn't reading very much. I took up other hobbies like ballroom dancing and juggling and piano playing and they made my day to day life much better. But this year I've again been reading a lot and things are shit
I read it four years ago. What i remember best from the novel is the time travelling hitman and this one scene where Pynchon describes garbage. Good novel but not very memorable. Comparing it to GR, you see, GR for me is a reality shifting novel. After I read it, i saw everyday interactions in a wholly new light. Very few novels can do that. So ofc it is not as good, not even close.
Easily. Roth's writing is nice and I enjoy his novels but I don't see how it is in any way any different from just about any other literary writer. DFW was the best writer alive in 2003 and I believe, was working on Oblivion that contains stories as good as Good old neon and The soul is not a smithy. Bloom is, as usual, wrong. The fact that anybody cares about the opinions of a literary critic who himself couldn't write for shit is wild to me.
Good for you and no. You post in r/passportbros. I understand. This whole publishing thing clearly hasn't worked out for you. Besides, even taking your claim seriously, there are many reasons a writer would want to publish their work. Many people want recognition, want to share what they've written even if it is not very good. This is a natural instinct people have. Why would i give you a thousand dollars to publish? That makes no logical sense at all. Frankly, that was such a knee jerk reaction, such a stupid, uncreative, clichéd thing to say... do you not see this? I want to call you many, many names but reddit might ban me so I won't. But ofc you are just trolling to get a rise out of me so whatever i guess.
I want to say "literary fiction" but it is kinda embarrassing to call your own stuff that so maybe "realist fiction with bizarre elements, sometimes". Closest to magical realism I would say but all my plots feel a bit like "this thing happened and then this unrelated thing happened and then this yet another unrelated thing happened". Sometimes I write autofiction in the style of Edouard Leve. But it is more like Jim Krusoe's work written in the style of Jean Philippe toussaint. I know it is not very good but I've been reading novels for a very long time and I know it isn't that bad, certainly not some masterpiece ofc you know
If so, how? I get discouraged just reading the requirements section of a lit journal... i don't want to write a third person bio of myself. Is there another way for me besides self publishing? With no industry connections? No money?
Middle aged women buy books like trinkets. To them absolutely everything is "fun" and disposable and really, the culture today rewards this kind of behavior like nothing else. I honestly couldn't care less if I tried. When I was like 18 years old, these things used to make me irritated but I have become too disillusioned with life to care about shit like this.
I realize that everything I read is something already acclaimed and praised by someone else. I feel like all I read is history... literary movements that do not and cannot belong to me. I would like to involve myself in whatever the equivalent of Montmartre, 1920 is presently. I do live close to new york city but I am not rich at all but even so, I would like to at least start by reading some contemporary novelists that are trying new things? Any names? Whenever I read literary journals, I find always that overdone, trite melancholy, some childhood trauma or else, excessively ingratating but at the same time extremely personal poetry too focused on sounds and quirk, in my opinion, rather than originality, vibrance or beauty.
Not quite this but have you read The lime twig by John Hawkes? It is very, very different from John Updike but here is the relevant part of a short goodreads review i wrote
The book has a great noir atmosphere. The characters felt vague and undefined to me but I think I am going to reread this soon, to get a better idea. I felt like the story (on the surface about stealing a race horse and winning big) is actually about our attempts at finding some meaning in every action we take until we can no longer resist temptation to hope for something more beautiful, to rise above the ocean waters and join the birds in the sky. We are almost certainly going to fail doing this and we will likely ruin our stable life in the process but the temptation is so beautiful and we will pursue it until we go absolutely mad. The characters in this novel act out of boredom, to hedonify their lives and to recreate something like a movie out of it. Of course, in the end everybody loses but the villains persevere.
Keep in mind though, it is not the easiest of reads and is nowhere near as gripping as Updike (probably, i haven't read Updike). You could also try reading Roth. Many of this protagonists do this, i think? As well as Franzen (ha!) or actually... virtually any novel from any white guy in the 20th century has a 70% chance of being exactly this! For a more moralistic tone, try Graham Greene's The Heart of the matter.
Contemporary books mhmmm, i don't know, maybe Sally Rooney?
Yeah, but Bukowski's writing does not have that energy unfortunately. I've only read Post Office. I understand what he is trying to do... the style, the rhythm, but sometimes the sentences do feel boring to me, especially compared to Vonnegut, Celine, Roth and Miller. Hamsun can go on and on too, especially in Hunger but well, you know. Never read Zola. My french isn't good enough.
Not Journey but practically anything else. He's easy to read except the occasional word here and there and some references here and there and he is just so invigorating. The hatred, it really makes you feel alive... always delivered with pounds of sarcasm, bitterness and it's so funny, so funny always. I think I have covid and I'm just so feverish and Castle to Castle is hilarious to me. The ellipses just go on and on and on... it's amazing! I recommend this novel guys! 100%!
