/lit/ - Literature

Not a popular stance on /lit/ but what I found helpful was actually reading literature by women. I don't mean to be an essentialist, there are plenty of good books about romance by male authors (personally, I think Graham Greene's novels contain a lot of accurate depictions of love), but understanding what women are processing when they enter into relationships is key.

Essentially, you will never be enough. We enter into romantic relationships to try to recapture the love of the lost object (mother's affection/childhood bliss) and project all of our hopes and desires onto lovers. Ice by Anna Kavan is a wonderful depiction of this process of identification, object selection, and then eventual heartbreak. At one moment, we believe we've found the replacement for our lost love and in the next we find we are trapped in a toxic, hurtful cycle of domination and subjection.

Once we do this a couple of times and realize we won't be satiated, we develop defense mechanisms and try to be selective about our choice of partner. While this protects us, it leads us to have a distorted view of the others we're romantically vetting. Fake Accounts, Lauren Oyler's debut novel details an extreme case of this tendency, depicting a woman trying to escape heartbreak by pretending to be a different person on every date. The narcissistic narrator is ultimately revealed to be unreliable and while we get a decent understanding of her flaws and internal character, we leave the novel realizing we haven't really learned anything about who she actually dated. It gets at the heart of the egotism of dating and how these defense mechanisms we build up leave us talking past each other, precluding genuine intimacy and connection.

Ultimately, dating women will involve a fair amount of disappointment and narcissism, for both parties. I've found it is worth pushing through, there are people capable of supportive, loving relationships. But, we're by design set up to fail at the ideal of romance imposed on us by culture. Literature that grapples with this problem, particularly from a woman's perspective, helps immensely at getting how women approach dating.

Just started picrel, reading a book by Seyyed Hossein Nasr on the side.

Not only has this book a shitty style, but it is also plotless. The world building is badly executed.

I don’t even understand why feminists love this book, except for the fact that the narrator is a “toxic male” (though he isn’t, he could have been a female and nothing in the book would have to change).

The themes of the book are not even unitary...


Please do not reply with “filtered”, unless you are going to substantiate your claim with arguments.

get memed bro

Meme me into reading this

I read this and enjoyed the very poetic prose, the oppressive and bleak atmosphere and the very intimate metaphor that it seemed to create. I know Anna Kavan has written a lot, and a lot even before her time in Arkham, but does any of her other work feel similar to this? I imagine even just poems by her would satisfy me at this point.

And if you're interested let's talk about Ice because I think it's worth discussing.

So I just finished reading this for a second time and think it may be my favorite novel.
Anything else like this? I see it grouped together as being part of a "slipstream" style of writing but have no idea what that genre really entails of.
Also, are any of her other works worth checking out? From brief synopsis' i read they all see similar thematically but I'm not too sure if they are as well received as Ice.

So Anna Kavan/ Slipstream thread I guess?

>>8185059
I really enjoyed it. I thought it was very touching and the writing was expressive. The part about the Challenger explosion in the middle and how it inspired him to write I thought was fantastic and on it's own worth reading. The meta-narrative stuff was also really interesting and fun; like this could have easily been about a white new york struggling poet feeling sad and scared and slightly surreal but I thought it was more than that and was pleasantly surprised.

>>8185449
Yep! It was Kavan's Ice. I think I liked the writing more than the story, which may not be that surprising. Parts like "I was committed to violence and must adhere to my pattern" and the connection between the characters was fantastic. It was just a little dry some times, but always very unnerving.

ITT: Favorite obscure book and why.