/lit/ - Literature

>>23247768
I can't remember if I read that or el Beso first, but I just remember that those two novels were a great intro to him, and that a few of his other books were very good. I couldn't say that he's a very artful writer, more that he's a very good technical writer in that he is able to manipulate the page and the mechanism of grammar to fit his needs. It makes sense that he worked in the film industry, both european and american: his novels often exude this feeling of being on the editing floor and making sense of these disparate images and themes.
That being said, another of the big truths I've learned along the way is that you don't have to like everything a writer ever produced. Authors have very unorthodox careers, and sometimes you may fall in love with one of their books but completely dismiss another. I haven't read everything by Melville and Beckett, but I've read enough to know that they didn't just write one continuous book over a lifetime that I'm sure to enjoy. I think we're often blessed by writer like Juan Rulfo, the ones who write one or two incredible books in a short span of time and then never publish again.
And that's another big revelation: that sometimes you need to come back to a book you didn't like and see if you can interpret it differently. I remember when I read Vineland again after university, after breezing through it in my teens, and regretting how I'd just written it off as a minor work (I've never read DFW, but I'm familiar with his complaint about the long wait between Gravity's Rainbow and Vineland). It's on par with Gaddis' Carpenter's Gothic, a book I'd always held in reverence but for the wrong reasons: I'd always praised the structure, themes, economy without really appreciating the human struggle for meaning and purpose. Any book you read and feel is important when you're in your formative years, you need to revisit in your mature years. It's an eye-opening experience.