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Anthony Briggs’ translation of War and Peace is pretty good, revised Maude might be technically the best
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Mar 14, 2022 20:48
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Reading Metropole (called Epepe in Hungarian) by Ferenc Karinthy, and it's pretty chaotic so far. A linguist accidentally arrives in a city where he doesn't speak the language, everywhere is crowded, and people are at best indifferent to his attempts at communicating, more often rude or even hostile. Everything is overwhelming and inexplicable. He's trying to figure out how to talk to an elevator operator though, so maybe he will finally understand and be understood (though I kind of doubt it lol)
Carthag Tuek fucked around with this message at 11:23 on Mar 15, 2022 |
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Mar 15, 2022 11:21
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The Briggs War and Peace isn't bad, but it's very, very liberal. I recommend the Oxford World Classics edition of the classic Maude translation, which was endorsed by Tolstoy himself; this version is judiciously revised by Amy Mandelker. Aside from that one, I also really like the Ann Dunnigan translation, published by Signet.
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Mar 15, 2022 15:53
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Sham bam bamina! posted:The Briggs War and Peace isn't bad, but it's very, very liberal. I recommend the Oxford World Classics edition of the classic Maude translation, which was endorsed by Tolstoy himself; this version is judiciously revised by Amy Mandelker. Aside from that one, I also really like the Ann Dunnigan translation, published by Signet. Politically, or in terms of textual faithfulness?
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Mar 15, 2022 16:07
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Oh, it voted for Buttigieg in the primary.
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Mar 15, 2022 22:00
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Read Ovid's Metamorphoses. It's wonderful. It's brutal and sweet and funny. No wonder it's still read centuries later.
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Mar 16, 2022 00:11
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Just finished My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Amos Tutuola and really enjoyed it. I've actually seen it and his first novel The Palm-Wine Drinkard on lists of best fantasy novels recently but I think that's stretching the definition of "fantasy" to the breaking point. I mean, it's the story of a young boy who flees into the bush to escape from slave traders and accidentally finds himself in a bizarre land of ghosts (not just in the sense of the spirits of the dead, although one of the towns he visits is basically that, but as a catch all term for all the spirits and creatures that haunt the forest), so I can see the connection, but this is about as far from the conventions of the genre as you can get. I particularly enjoyed the distinctive patterns of speech employed, especially the widespread use of the past continuous tense where most American and British writers would use other tense. It somehow lends the book a sense of timelessness, like, these events didn't just happen once, they were happening for essentially forever. Whether that was an intentional decision or just a matter of the way Tutuola's Nigerian English accent/dialect works is hard to say for someone who's never been to Nigeria, but it's really cool. It's also an absolutely filthy book, in the literal sense, not as a metaphor for sexuality or anything like that. Over and over he describes being so thoroughly covered by flies and mosquitos that he's unrecognizable to the people around him. At one point a ghost appears to him who is covered from head to toe in open sores and asks him to cure her affliction by licking the sores continuously for 10 years, and it's all presented in such a matter-of-fact kind of way with little if any attempt at deciphering the meaning of the imagery. It's very dreamlike in that sense, these things happened, this imagery was seen, let's move on to the next scene.
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Mar 16, 2022 07:51
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stereobreadsticks posted:Just finished My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Amos Tutuola and really enjoyed it. I've actually seen it and his first novel The Palm-Wine Drinkard on lists of best fantasy novels recently but I think that's stretching the definition of "fantasy" to the breaking point. I mean, it's the story of a young boy who flees into the bush to escape from slave traders and accidentally finds himself in a bizarre land of ghosts (not just in the sense of the spirits of the dead, although one of the towns he visits is basically that, but as a catch all term for all the spirits and creatures that haunt the forest), so I can see the connection, but this is about as far from the conventions of the genre as you can get. I particularly enjoyed the distinctive patterns of speech employed, especially the widespread use of the past continuous tense where most American and British writers would use other tense. It somehow lends the book a sense of timelessness, like, these events didn't just happen once, they were happening for essentially forever. Whether that was an intentional decision or just a matter of the way Tutuola's Nigerian English accent/dialect works is hard to say for someone who's never been to Nigeria, but it's really cool. iirc some of the syntax and sentence structure he uses is actually from yoruba, just being applied to english. although that's more or less how pidgin english tends to work anyway i suppose.
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Mar 16, 2022 09:46
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Well, that escalated! Great ending, recommended
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Mar 16, 2022 10:16
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Fwiw i think tutuola mixes together Nigerian English and invents his own 'mistakes' ... I remember in my edition of The Palm-Wine Drinkard they showed a page of his original fair copy that had been altered by the publishers removing all kinds of intentional errors in spelling etc
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Mar 16, 2022 14:24
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Nerdburger_Jansen posted:I read through Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays. It's got a certain perfection, like nothing needs to be added or taken away from it. I also can't help but feel like anyone who talks about the depiction of 'Hollywood nihilism' in stuff like Bojack Horseman needs to read this instead. Play It As It Lays is fabulous, and if you've got a few hours to kill the film version is easy to find and manages a great translation of the themes to screen.
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Mar 16, 2022 19:09
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Jrbg posted:Fwiw i think tutuola mixes together Nigerian English and invents his own 'mistakes' ... I remember in my edition of The Palm-Wine Drinkard they showed a page of his original fair copy that had been altered by the publishers removing all kinds of intentional errors in spelling etc in the later books he explicitly tried to write his english in a more 'correct' way which is why they're not as good and spontaneous. palm wine drinkard is the most unfucked with of all of them, and the intro to my life in the bush of ghosts talks about how it was constrained a bit by the editors.
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Mar 16, 2022 19:33
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stereobreadsticks posted:I particularly enjoyed the distinctive patterns of speech employed, especially the widespread use of the past continuous tense where most American and British writers would use other tense. It somehow lends the book a sense of timelessness, like, these events didn't just happen once, they were happening for essentially forever. Whether that was an intentional decision or just a matter of the way Tutuola's Nigerian English accent/dialect works is hard to say for someone who's never been to Nigeria, but it's really cool. You might also enjoy the "rotten English" in Ken Saro-Wiwa's Sozaboy, a dark comedy about a child soldier in the Nigerian civil war. On an entirely different note, I just finished Charles Portis's Masters of Atlantis. It's a comic novel about a secret society and the motley group of true believers and con-men who run it. It's fun sorting out who is which as you follow their misadventures. It can get a little dark and mean-spirited at times, but that's mainly directed towards the con-men characters, while the true believers are treated more with pity.
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Mar 17, 2022 14:14
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stereobreadsticks posted:Just finished My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Amos Tutuola and really enjoyed it. I've actually seen it and his first novel The Palm-Wine Drinkard on lists of best fantasy novels recently but I think that's stretching the definition of "fantasy" to the breaking point. I mean, it's the story of a young boy who flees into the bush to escape from slave traders and accidentally finds himself in a bizarre land of ghosts (not just in the sense of the spirits of the dead, although one of the towns he visits is basically that, but as a catch all term for all the spirits and creatures that haunt the forest), so I can see the connection, but this is about as far from the conventions of the genre as you can get. I particularly enjoyed the distinctive patterns of speech employed, especially the widespread use of the past continuous tense where most American and British writers would use other tense. It somehow lends the book a sense of timelessness, like, these events didn't just happen once, they were happening for essentially forever. Whether that was an intentional decision or just a matter of the way Tutuola's Nigerian English accent/dialect works is hard to say for someone who's never been to Nigeria, but it's really cool. this sounds so good. thanks for writing it up.
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Mar 17, 2022 14:20
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Yeah its been one I have wanted to get for some time
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Mar 17, 2022 17:06
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Recommend me another one on the level of Blinding thread, tia
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Mar 20, 2022 01:52
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Bilirubin posted:Recommend me another one on the level of Blinding thread, tia Is there even anything? His other book available in English, Nostalgia, was close in parts
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Mar 20, 2022 02:55
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just looking to top off my book store run tomorrow with something very good, help folks out who get shut down every Saturday due to protesters for are freedoms. What did you read that you really liked lately derp?
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Mar 20, 2022 04:31
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Bilirubin posted:just looking to top off my book store run tomorrow with something very good, help folks out who get shut down every Saturday due to protesters for are freedoms. What did you read that you really liked lately derp? I really liked The Pastor by Hanne Orstavik, and also just finished reading The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Briggs, by Rilke, which was amazingly beautiful but so much so I could only read a few pages at a time
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Mar 20, 2022 06:11
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Bilirubin posted:Recommend me another one on the level of Blinding thread, tia try hop on pop by dr seuss
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Mar 21, 2022 04:31
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A human heart posted:try hop on pop by dr seuss Hand Hand Fingers Thumb or get out Seriously though you do good recommendations, and I apprecaite them
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Mar 21, 2022 05:05
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Modulo16 posted:I read Oedipus, Illiad, and Odyssey in Highschool for an english class, and I couldn't appreciate it at the time. I wanted to go back and read the works and learn to appreciate them better. As far as what I am into: I like Micheal Connelly and Elmore Leonard as far as crime novels, but I'd like to branch more into stories that really bring out emotion. Lunchmeat Larry posted:So I finally read Cyclonopedia and I think I'm just too stupid to read books now, I have no idea what that was about or what to really take away from it My man. CestMoi posted:the stories in slow learner aren't fantastic, but the little intros and discussions he has of his process are really cool and you get much more of an understanding of how his huge maximalist novels are constructed, iirc there's a story called entropy where he's like 'yeah i learned about entropy and thought it sounded neat and i wrote this story and then later learned i'd kind of misunderstood entropy', and huge parts of books like gravity's rainbow or against the day seem to come from the same place of devour books on disparate topics and connect them constantly but this time check you've actually understood them. which is probably why we'll never get another big pynchon, he's never going to escape wikipedia Learning about Pynchons life before writing is really eye opening for his stuff, especially in relation to his books from the 60s and 70s. Very likely he knew some pretty top secret poo poo and was actually worried about his safety for what he knew after writing Crying of Lot 49. He literally worked on a top secret network of information exchange hidden from public knowledge (a precursor to the internet that linked domestic nuclear missile sites together).
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Mar 21, 2022 15:41
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I just finished beloved by Toni Morrison and I loved it. Maybe top five ever? There especially was the theee chapters where beloved is my sister or beloved is my daughter or beloved is me. Haunted by that chapter.
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Mar 23, 2022 05:57
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Finished the Leopard by GT di Lampedusa. Really, really good, bit of the same theme as in Buddenbrooks with the degeneration of a family line as they enter modernity, except this time they're sicilian aristocrats instead of lubeckian merchants. Not quite as good as Mann's book though.
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Apr 1, 2022 16:16
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Buddenbrooks is paced weirdly (as is The Magic Mountain) while The Leopard is paced perfectly, which makes it the second best story of aristocratic degeneration after The Cherry Orchard
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Apr 1, 2022 17:31
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where does that leave the magnificent ambersons?
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Apr 2, 2022 03:26
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I picked up a nice copy of Carlos Fuentes’s Aura. It has both the original text and the English translation. I only have seen people discuss Terra Nostra, but this one sounded cool, and it’s pretty short.
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Apr 2, 2022 23:57
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currently reading Havoc by Tom Kristensen, about a literary critic who decides to solve his ennui in the most Danish way possible: drinking himself to death I also bought Chasing Homer by Laszlo Krasznahorkai today
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Apr 4, 2022 20:18
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Knauer extolling the virtues of nofap is killing me. My buddy sent me paragraphs talking that at 3am once. Swore he now inhabited the real world instead of the false one, that his lifts went through the roof, and his mental acuity was razor sharp. Then of course a week later he tells me it was all bullshit. Now I can't even focus on the story because this poo poo.
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Apr 17, 2022 17:21
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Semen retention, it’s out there!
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Apr 17, 2022 18:39
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I've found myself in love with Truffaut's work as a director, and seeing his own devotion to Balzac I was going to jump that train now that I've finished Demian, then I head to the book store and realize the dude was a one man printing press. Any recommendations for something to use as a starter, or do I just YOLO myself into La Comédie humaine
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Apr 17, 2022 20:56
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started Melancholy of resistance, it’s good so far Krasz is a master when it comes to making you feel the tension and unrest
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Apr 17, 2022 22:39
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Gaius Marius posted:I've found myself in love with Truffaut's work as a director, and seeing his own devotion to Balzac I was going to jump that train now that I've finished Demian, then I head to the book store and realize the dude was a one man printing press. you're right, he did work as a printer. I usually start with the obvious ones, so I'd say go with Father Goriot or Lost Illusions. also https://twitter.com/jesslbergman/status/1516110190151868416?s=20&t=R9_tcxtvd_D-xEofJXGutA Syncopated fucked around with this message at 20:14 on Apr 20, 2022 |
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Apr 19, 2022 11:24
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Cousin Bette is very good too, as is Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes
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Apr 19, 2022 12:12
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https://twitter.com/MasakiJinzaburo/status/1516160130890534915?s=20&t=y4npxbRE1SP3LoiPcINf8g
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Apr 20, 2022 20:15
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Syncopated posted:https://twitter.com/MasakiJinzaburo/status/1516160130890534915?s=20&t=y4npxbRE1SP3LoiPcINf8g Come on how could the author of Confessions of a Mask possibly be homosexual
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Apr 20, 2022 20:57
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apophenium posted:I read this and thought it was really good but also I don't think I'll ever want to revisit it or even think about it again. There's something about this wave of "Online" books (like Lauren Oyler's Fake Accounts that ages instantly and that I cringe away from in hindsight. Perhaps because it's describing an embarrassing stage of human social interaction that I'd rather not think about too much. Realize this is an old post but I read No One Is Talking About This last year and really loved it, both because it's very funny and aware of how cringey those parts of it are, while also tying it together with the ending where the online world becomes increasingly irrelevant when faced with actual human connection and crisis. Meanwhile, I could barely get through the first 30 pages of Fake Accounts before giving up -- insufferably bland prose, the way she went on forever trying to describe the act of using an iPhone was much more obnoxious than anything. I won't criticize too much since I didn't read much past the opening, but I instantly got the sense this book would be tortuous to get through. Lockwood I found much more honest and open and I feel like if any of these online books has a shot at aging well it'll be that one, if only for how direct and witty her prose is and for the emotional weight of the climax.
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Apr 20, 2022 21:09
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Syncopated posted:https://twitter.com/MasakiJinzaburo/status/1516160130890534915?s=20&t=y4npxbRE1SP3LoiPcINf8g
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Apr 23, 2022 19:54
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Sham bam bamina! posted:Tried to get a handle on the context here and felt my brain starting to melt. There's a significant contingent of right wing dipshits who are really, really into Mishima but don't seem to have read any of his fiction or learned anything about him as a person
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Apr 23, 2022 20:03
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Mishima? the same Mishima that would pay young men to be his private audience while he play-acted his own suicide to the point of orgasm? pulling-out-a-long-red-cloth-from-his-own-stomach-to-simulate-blood-while-simultaneously-cumming Mishima?
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Apr 24, 2022 03:45
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