/lit/ - Literature

Have any of you faggots read this shit? It's pissing me off.

sup

oh man, The Unconsoled is a goldmine of rage

>An incomprehensible mess: The Unconsoled may be hailed by those who like their fiction meandering and plotless, under the assumption that the anomie is literary, like Kafka. Instead, the book is utterly artless, prosaic, dull, and plodding, with no resolution, no arc of character development. Imagine Paul Auster writing under the influence of a concussion. The Unconsoled is a long, boring dream, where events seem random and without meaning. Characters are only developed as caricatures, like the rush of people who inhabit Dostoyevsky's appalling The Idiot but not even with a distant undertone of theme. Is it: the Artist as Outcast? The Simpletons in Small towns (yes, there's an implied insult in the potrayal of these people)? Who knows. The protaganist, a pianist, has an ill-defined relationship with a carping woman and her annoying child and numerous strange encounters with one-dimensional townsfolk. These folks merely relay their own idiosyncratic and tedious stories, which do not cohere into a plot. Repitition, in fact, is used as a device, and that's not good news. The other main strain involves an aging alcoholic conductor who seeks to re-establish a relationship with a wallflower he abused years ago. He then suffers a bizarre leg injury and, taking a drink, disgraces himself. Other sub-plots are murkier and not worthy of discussion. It's a bad David Lynch movie, without the fun of the bizarre. (It's not so bad that it's good.) Indeed, you could re-juggle the order of the chapters and it would make little difference in effect. And the language, for an author hailed as a genious, is devoid of beauty. Don't look for the telling simile here, just a run of words. On and on and on.