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Lex Neville posted:Funny use of whittle i'm subversive that way, he said, cursing his phone's weird autocorrect of "while"
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Nov 12, 2018 17:03
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 12:14 |
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finished salman rushdie's Quichotte the other day i thought Two Years... was basically a stuffier take on a fantasy novel and i ran like hell from The Golden House because the summary would have filled every square on an "neoliberal intelligentsia" bingo card, but this one was decent, if bogged down by rushdie's now-familiar writing conceits and privileged status within the society he's trying to interrogate. he's basically trying to create magical-realist pastiches of american culture in the way he previously did for england and india, and maybe it's just that my proximity to the subject material makes it less compelling, but he's still examining subjects like the opioid crisis and social media saturation exclusively from the perspectives of characters who are either in the upper crust of society or could be in the upper crust but are too bashful to admit it, which makes most of his ruminations too shallow to be really impactful. there's a whole commentary on the impending dissolution of polite society that runs throughout the entire novel that was more succinctly and memorably summed up in that one paragraph from The Ground Beneath Her Feet ("We dined at nine! We dined at eight! You were on time! No, you were late!") and for someone who's spent a career preoccupied with the concept of divided national identities, he touches on the subject of american racism so vaguely and fleetingly that it's like he's embarrassed to be associated with it the prose is still snappy, especially the passages written from the perspective of one character who emerged ex nihilo from another character's imagination (like Jodha from The Enchantress of Florence - again, he's repeating old concepts pretty much verbatim) and has to struggle with basic vocabulary as he describes his own existential crisis, but the metafiction here is so heavy-handed that it gets close to parody. the novel is a dual narrative where the characters of one half are literally being written in a novel by a character in the other half, and the former's struggles and conflicts are imperfect mirrors of the latter's, and it all gets about as tedious as you'd expect overall it was a good page-turner but mostly came off as someone trying to recapture past glories. maybe it's just that i'm still teed off that he keeps showing up at Ozyfest Oxxidation fucked around with this message at 02:03 on Feb 17, 2020 |
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Feb 17, 2020 01:46
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Sarern posted:I finished Pale Fire and it owned, what Nabokov should I read next? invitation to a beheading
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May 10, 2021 16:49
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Heath posted:I picked up Mark Twain's "Roughing It" for the first time since high school and I forgot (or didn't realize in the first place) how funny he is. Every single paragraph is a joke quote:Every noun [in German] has a gender, and there is no sense or system in the distribution; so the gender of each must be learned separately and by heart. There is no other way. To do this, one has to have a memory like a memorandum book. In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl. See how it looks in print—I translate this from a conversation in one of the best of the German Sunday-school books:
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Nov 13, 2021 23:55
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ulvir posted:hope it’s nothing like the road wonder if one of them is The Passenger, he’s been talking about it for years I’d become convinced that The Counselor bombing had caused him to retire from publication entirely
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Mar 14, 2022 11:35
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the Mormon priest’s parable might not be the best passage he’s ever written but it’s at least in the top five
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Jan 18, 2024 05:15
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going to check out tutuola because the famished road felt like a parody of a literary tradition I wasn’t familiar with yet
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Apr 19, 2024 22:00
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 12:14 |
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i liked victory city fine but quichotte's not great. i think that when rushdie's good he's unmatched (the razing of pachigam in shalimar the clown is probably still my favorite passage in fiction period) but his best days are behind him and the latter half of his bibliography mostly retreads the former, except with weaker presentation and less subtlety - quichotte for example has several commentaries on trumpism that are one step removed from a kelly cartoon
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Apr 20, 2024 00:25
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