/lit/ - Literature

>>21053345
I taught myself French around 35 to 40 years old to escape from the Anglosphere mentality, not that the Anglosphere is a particularly bad thing but just because it's important to get some other points of view, other ways of thinking. By the way, Conrad was Polish, wrote his novels in French, then translated them to English.

Many novels are constructed upon memoirs. Thackaray's Barry Lyndon and Gogol's Dead Souls for example are pretty much straight up plagarisms of Giacomo di Casanova's memoirs. The first thing I really read in French was the 12 volume Plon Edition that took 4 months to work through. I can talk about this for hours and hours, bore you shitless. The Plon edition was a project by pretty much all the greatest scholars of the 18th century to ascertain whether he really existed. They tracked him everywhere and found him precisely where he said he was with the very people he said he was with. It's a magnificent book. It's the best single resource we have on the 18th century and how people lived. Check out Fellini's Casanova if you ever get the chance. It's up on Rutracker.org. Excellent movie. Fellini hated Casanova. Casanova was a secret agent for the Freemasons plotting to overthrow the Ancien Regime. The plot succeeded much to Casanova's dismay as it turned out that there was nothing that he loved more in the world than the culture of the Ancien Regime.

The big challenge for me in French is Louis Ferdinand Celine but I'm winning. My French is good enough to catch his subtle references, his nuances. Not quite James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake but almost.

Get your hands on a copy of Huysman's A Rebours then read Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. You'll have a lot of fun, an immense pleasure. Life was made for a pleasure not for a pain.

I'm not much for poetry but you know, read Spenser's Faerie Queen. Take your time. I read good literature all the time out loud esp the French.

Beckett's More Pricks Than Kicks, don't miss it.
Huizinga's Waning of the Middle Ages.
Barbara Tuchmann's Proud Tower then August 1914

Milton + GF Handel ...L'allegro et il penserosos. (skip il moderato a non miltonian addition)
https://youtu.be/PL_4VQphfQg

Read it carefully as you listen.

https://youtu.be/xPZFHBzQ_oM