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Several short comments, some of them off topic. Sorry in advance. Scandi lit That would make a great thread, and I'd have plenty of opinions (= win-win). Let me start with a few. Please, no dragon tattooed women. Tomas Transtömer is pretty much a well kept secret and an amazing writer, according to every loving person who ever read him. He's still on my shelf, but not on the top of the pile. Pär Lagerkvists The Dwarf was necessary after WW2, and I'm impressed by how fast he evoked that fascist feeling without wooing everyone away. Someone must have liked him, he was an early laureate after the war. Personally I think The Sybil is on par, and Barabbas even better than these two. Do your self a favor and read them. Try getting some Svend Åge Madsen, Danish modernist writer. Only his heavy books are great, the other are experimentations in style including a Choose your own Adventure for adult readers (not as in porn but as in grown up). Tugt og Utugt i Mellemtiden, Virtue and Vice in the MIddle Time is an absolute favorite from my adolescence, and and was even better when I re-read it at 30. Description here: http://www.themodernnovel.com/danish/madsen/tugt.htm Danish poets: Inger Christensen and Henrik Nordbrandt are really nice reads. Look them up, I think they both won the Nordic Council annual literature prize, the greatest honor in Scandinavia apart from big N. Danish laureates tend to be boring as gently caress, except perhaps Johannes V Jensen's The Fall of the King which many people adore and I have skipped so far. On Hesse and Steppenwolf: I did not read it as a descent into madness, but as an allegory of his personal rite of passage into being wise and mature. Hesse, ever the Eastern Mystic wannabe, wants to shows us how HH transcends from a dialectic love/hate god/evil parallel to being able to take on thousand forms of being. I think he wants to give the Western man the possibly to become a boddhisatva. And that is, if you read his own opinions, not some 20-year old hippie in 1969, but a middle-aged man with a functionary job. He wants the most boring and dialectic class of people he could think of - early 20th century functionaries (either work and perish intellectually and artistically, or don't work and perish altogether) - to transcend into a multitude of beings. This is absolutely my own reading, but I think he made a pretty clear point. The killing at the end of madness was the ending of transition, not a relapse or a consolidation of madness. It was the end of his visions. Any comments? edit: typos and Günter Grass: I liked Mein Jahrhundert, My Century, a lot. and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Please read A Hundred year of Solitude, or, if you want to shy away from the big novels, Noone writes to the Colonel - his own favourite. rasser fucked around with this message at 20:04 on Mar 20, 2014 |
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Mar 20, 2014 19:56
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Hedningen posted:Johannes V Jensen is pretty drat good - I really recommend Fall of the King when you get a chance to sit down and read it. I was re-reading the Madsen link above. That, and the Kierkegaardian aesthetics you mention, just made it plain loving simple that I have had no clue what I was reading. Tugt og Utugt was before I knew 19th century lit at all. I just got the rug pulled out from under me and the only consolation is, there's even more to a writer I've enjoyed and re-read. Madsen recommendations then? The doctorate thesis, the guided reader and then which novels by himself?
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Mar 21, 2014 21:42
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Ezzum posted:Currently reading The Enigma Of Arrival by V.S. Naipaul, the 2001 winner. I am seriously underwhelmed. I remember reading the beginning of John Steinbeck's East of Eden and thinking, 'drat, this description of the Salinas valley just goes on and on'. It extended for ten whole pages, no action, just describing the valley. It's the same here except it just doesn't end. Every couple of sentences there's some Hemingway-an description of the landscape and it really just gets tedious. So far I am just really bored. It's been 15 years or more, but I don't remember anything like this in A Bend in the River, which is a great read and serves as an introduction to a now forgotten subject: the violent cleansing of Indians and Persians from East Africa.
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Mar 23, 2014 10:09
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