/lit/ - Literature

>>19750646
>>19750450
You unironically don't have the IQ to appreciate it and I mean that with no disrespect. The great prose stylists spend a long time talking about something but do so in a manner that's aesthetically pleasing. That what it comes down to - aesthetic appreciation, in much the same way you might enjoy poetry - rather than the wholly utilitarian view that prose exists solely to advance plot and cannot be appreciated in its own right.

So I can take, say, Portrait of the Artist, and Lolita, or To the Lighthouse, and read those novels for reasons other than that of plot. In the first and second of these novels plot is almost incidental to the impressions, moods, and feelings that the authors seek to describe. Joyce and Woolf are certainly more concerned with beauty than with plot in these works (which does not mean, by the way, that they are also unconcerned with characterisation). The plot in Lolita has a bit more to it, but I can assure you it would not be held in such esteem if it was stripped to the bones and told in a minimalistic style - people read it for the joy of the language.

Either you take pleasure in language for its own sake, or you don't. I'm not denigrating your lack of aesthetic appreciation. I am an ecumenical reader. Take what you like and leave what you don't. But there is a sizeable subset of readers who pick up a novel for reasons other than following the usual train of exposition, rising tension, climax, resolution. After fifty or a hundred novels the beats turn stale, and you look instead to the brilliant turns of phrase that scratch an itch you didn't even know you had, and stay with you.

I leave you with the opening of Brideshead Revisited, by one of the greatest English language prose stylists of the nineteenth century, as an example of this. See if you can take anything from it other than the progression of plot alone.

Had a great thread on this the other day. It's terrific. Here's the opening to chapter 1.

When it's done right it's kino. Brideshead Revisited is one of the most beautifully written books in the English language.

>>18072634
>>18072024
Can't believe I share a board with plebeian like this. Go back to Dan Brown or Stephen King