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Did Gogol's The Portrait have any effect on Oscar Wilde and The Picture of Dorian Gray? Maybe it's just a superficial shared element, the creepy painting.
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Apr 18, 2020 01:50
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I'm struggling a little with Robin Buss's translation of The Count of Monte Cristo. His English is just too plain and modern for me, to the point of being somewhat difficult to pay attention to at times.
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Jun 11, 2020 03:26
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I read The Crying of Lot 49 today. It felt very fresh in its style despite its age. The plot summary of the stage play was a particular highlight.
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May 7, 2021 10:34
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I read Lolita. The second part went in many directions that I didn't all find compelling. I did appreciate the book as a glimpse of life in postwar America, though the author speaks of such reading as "childish" in the afterword. The dialogues from the school head master were incredibly hilarious, though they do feel a little out of place.
FPyat fucked around with this message at 16:10 on Jun 26, 2021 |
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Jun 26, 2021 16:05
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Originality in writing: does it exist?
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Aug 15, 2021 13:37
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Is Hermanm Hesse good or just liked by pretentious people? I finished Narcissus and Goldmund and it turned out to be one of those books that would have completely rocked my world had I read it at a younger age, but as it stands is just good.
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Oct 27, 2021 02:50
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I cannot imagine being someone who wasn't highly aware of all the most major historical events from the age of 16 onwards.
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Nov 30, 2021 14:05
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CestMoi posted:by 16 i got really obsessed with the concept of most major historical events and tried to channel them constantly I know you're joking but when I was growing up I was spending a lot of time being very upset and soul-searching over historical atrocities.
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Dec 1, 2021 15:59
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James Joyce posted:Every step brought him nearer to London, farther from his own sober inartistic life. A light began to tremble on the horizon of his mind. He was not so old—thirty-two. His temperament might be said to be just at the point of maturity. There were so many different moods and impressions that he wished to express in verse. He felt them within him. He tried to weigh his soul to see if it was a poet’s soul. Melancholy was the dominant note of his temperament, he thought, but it was a melancholy tempered by recurrences of faith and resignation and simple joy. If he could give expression to it in a book of poems perhaps men would listen. He would never be popular: he saw that. He could not sway the crowd but he might appeal to a little circle of kindred minds. The English critics, perhaps, would recognize him as one of the Celtic school by reason of the melancholy tone of his poems; besides that, he would put in allusions. He began to invent sentences and phrases from the notices which his book would get. Mr Chandler has the gift of easy and graceful verse…. A wistful sadness pervades these poems…. The Celtic note. It was a pity his name was not more Irish-looking. Perhaps it would be better to insert his mother’s name before the surname: Thomas Malone Chandler, or better still: T. Malone Chandler. He would speak to Gallaher about it.
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Feb 3, 2022 22:46
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Is anyone familiar with The Seven Basic Plots? I keep running into people who hype it up.
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Feb 13, 2022 20:32
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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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Read some Balzac, such as Père Goriot. You can see a line of descent to Dostoevsky in the monologues.
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Dec 30, 2022 10:28
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The Rings of Saturn is marvellous. Is there anything else like it?
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Jan 5, 2023 10:56
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Seeing people bring up the lack of phones in movies, have any authors handled the invention of the smartphone artfully yet?
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Aug 6, 2023 11:19
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Philip Roth really caught my breath with Goodbye, Columbus. Makes me much more eager than I was earlier to read his later work. The lightbulb monologue in particular gives me a reason to go back and give Death of a Salesman another look. I'm reading the first short story in the volume and I bet they're all gonna be great.
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Sep 30, 2023 13:34
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No, it’s my very first of his.
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Oct 1, 2023 01:30
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Wouldn't Dostoevsky have been taking that from his own life-changing brush with the bullet?
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Oct 4, 2023 07:58
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What’s the worst experience you’ve had with an award-winner? (Or just a general feeling that the book in no way deserved that prize) The Sellout won a Booker, started out strong, then stopped having anything funny or worthwhile to say a third of the way through. Managed to make a black guy keeping a slave boring.
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Oct 12, 2023 02:19
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All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren marks the first time I've read a piece of serious fiction longer than 500 pages in years. It did well to ease me into the literary groove, rich with allusion and contemplation. Warren seems both critical and affectionate towards the South, depicting it both as having deep wells of history, beauty and tradition and as being full of corrupt backwardness. It's described as a book about Huey Long's fictional counterpoint, but the protagonist Jack Burden is the heart of the story, far more so than Nick is in The Great Gatsby. The lengthy digression telling of the life of his 19th century ancestor on its own would make a tremendous short story. I was quite entertained in the end by the editor's note to the new edition, which is quite critical of Warren's original editor for being totally insensitive to theme and subtext.
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Oct 15, 2023 10:14
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V. getting very detailed in recounting the process of nasal plastic surgery is truthfully the most grotesque I've seen a published novel get.
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Oct 19, 2023 10:45
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I regret to reveal that there is Pynchon filk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKgauv6CH0s
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Oct 24, 2023 10:33
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Finished Pynchon's V. after two weeks of reading. I don't have anything particularly intelligent to say about its ideas or themes, but it's a titanic book. Something about the mad nightmare of modern civilization. It did surprise me with how serious it managed to get, when Lot 49 and the first 270 pages of this trained me to think of Pynchon as a very silly writer. I can scarcely imagine what Gravity's Rainbow will be like, if it's considered to be an even greater achievement. One thing to note is that there are two sieges in the novel, which put me in the mind of Victorian siege fiction. I occasionally see vague references to such a genre's existence, but have been unable to find any hard substantiation or evidence, with the most famous clear cut example of such a story, The Siege of Khrishnapur, having been written long after V. itself. I wonder if such books were written about the international settlement in Peking during the Boxer Rebellion? FPyat fucked around with this message at 08:37 on Oct 30, 2023 |
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Oct 30, 2023 08:28
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The dumber conversations I see on this site are still rather elevated compared to what I find in the wider world of social media and in-person literary dialogue.
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Nov 1, 2023 04:34
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My mother's a teacher of English translation, so I grew up with all kinds of classics and 20th century American lit on the shelves. She's a bit clueless when it comes to any intellectual subject that isn't literature, poetry, or language, which I guess created a gap in my ability to talk about what I read with her. I do hope I get to share my thoughts on Middlemarch with her, though.
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Nov 1, 2023 04:50
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I just associate Raffles with the founder of Singapore, so it wouldn't stand out as a name for me.
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Nov 1, 2023 05:02
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I saw that CineD argument you had. Genius luminary thought compared to the kinds of ideas about art people have confronted me with on other sites.
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Nov 2, 2023 00:06
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This morning I got into a tussle with people who think the main character needs to be a moral person in order to be able to engage the audience's sympathy. I wish that thinking artifice and difficulty are not desirable traits was the worst opinion on fiction I ran into.
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Nov 2, 2023 05:17
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I’ve seen some tremendous bursts of fury when I suggested to people that they could benefit from expanding the pool of books they read from outside flavor of the month bestsellers. “You can’t go around telling people they’re wrong to do what they enjoy. What is wrong with you?”
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Nov 21, 2023 02:00
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I am somewhat intrigued by the argument that the novel as a form is inimical to tragedy, though I hesitate to wholly embrace it.Terry Eagleton posted:A tragic theatre bound up with the despotic absolutism, courtly intrigue, traditional feuds, rigid laws of kinship, codes of honour, cosmic-world-views and faith in destiny gives way to the more rational, hopeful, realist, pragmatic ideologies of the middle class. What rules now is less fate than human agency … The public realm of tragedy, with its high-pitched rhetoric and fateful economy, is abandoned for the privately consumed, more expansive, ironic, everyday language of prose fiction. And this … is certainly a loss: some critics, as Henri Peyre suggests, blame the death of tragedy on the novel, which “captured the essentials of tragic emotion, while diluting and often cheapening it.”
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Nov 21, 2023 09:36
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It's from his book Sweet Violence, which I am now interested in reading after seeing it quoted. I did indeed find the quote within a post by Adam Roberts built around the thought that a novel might have to craft an entire society in decline and fall to express the tragic mode. https://medium.com/adams-notebook/some-dystopian-thoughts-454fa9665cb3 FPyat fucked around with this message at 09:58 on Nov 21, 2023 |
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Nov 21, 2023 09:56
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When I hear the word entertainment, I reach for my gun.
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Dec 6, 2023 12:02
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It appears that Coatzee’s new novella The Pole is about a man from Eastern Europe, not an upright cylinder.
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Dec 24, 2023 10:52
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I don't go in for P&V myself, but a Russian Dostoevsky-lover did tell me about this video where they're evaluated favorably compared to Barnett and Hogarth. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6thCyertFQ
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Jan 2, 2024 11:01
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How’s The Gambler? People seem to deem it a lesser novel of his.
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Jan 4, 2024 07:03
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I need help understanding what is meant when an artwork is critiqued as being "sentimental." I'll see a work that affected me strongly be praised for not being burdened with sentimentality, so it doesn't seem to mean being an emotionless vulcan. On the other hand, it doesn't quite appear to be criticizing schmaltzy or cheap emotionality, but some deeper and more serious disagreement about the nature of feeling.
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Jan 13, 2024 09:42
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I see Primo Levi's Auschwitz memoir being praised as containing not a hint of sentimentality. Which I guess is the case where it makes the most sense to me, where honestly depicting life in the camp will express far more than waxing lyrical about pain and misery possibly could.
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Jan 13, 2024 13:29
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ThePopeOfFun posted:James Baldwin gave the best definition of sentimentality in his essay (click the link to the .pdf) Everybody's Protest Novel. Like all Baldwin's work, the essay hits just as hard today because we have the same problems and movies like The Green Book routinely take home Oscars. It's a genius essay. That’s great, thanks. I guess a big tension point I see in sentimentalism is whether Dickens was its exemplar.
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Jan 14, 2024 04:06
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I was not expecting the adenoid attack to come this early in the book. I assume it's a tribute to 1958's The Blob, with a few other B-movies mixed in.
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Jan 17, 2024 08:53
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I genuinely prefer Calvino’s Cosmicomics to Borges, though they’re a mite bit less cerebral.
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Jan 23, 2024 01:36
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Sometimes people freak out when I tell them that there are authors who don’t use quotation marks. A few of them become outright angry.quote:Yeah, 'art' authors tend to get famous for a while. Bit of a flash in the pan though. And most of us poor folk don't really care about them. They're for rich people, and their books sit unread in libraries. Books that it's more important to own than actual read.
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Jan 30, 2024 05:11
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