/lit/ - Literature

Swann's way is doing this currently

>>12567101
first 3-4 chapters of a farewell to arms

>>12567101
Two actually: the god of shall things and Moby-dick. Both have had and will continue to have a great impact on my writing

What books did that for you, OP, my friend?

>>12567123
>the god of shall things and Moby-dick
Sweet merciful Christ. To see these two in the same sentence...

Fuck /lit/

>>12567123
>What books did that for you, OP, my friend?
Catcher in the Rye when I was younger (yea, I know), One Hundred Years of Solitude when I first read it. Borges and Cortázar in Spanish.

Absalom, Absalom

>>12567155
>>12567123
Forgot about Lezama! That guy's on another dimension.

>>12567101
Bolanjo, that fever-dream priest book.

wonderful read.

>>12567132
Why do you say this, my friend? Those books were very influential to me for personal reasons. I'm not equating or placing judgment on these very different books. I'm simply expressing that the two works had some meaningful, ineffable effect on me.

>>12567201
still me, forgot to say: naked lunch

>>12567101
The beats.

>>12567179
>Lezama
I'm not very familiar with his work unfortunately. What would you recommend from him? What do you like a lot about him, Anon?

>>12567201
>Bolanjo,
You mean Bolaño?
> that fever-dream priest book
Yea, I also liked By Night in Chile, I like how the narrative is tight and in a single paragraph, only to break that parapragh at the end.

What basic structures does a language need to possess in order for a user to express things in it eloquently?
What factors other than a user's ability define the upper bound on a language's ability as a good enough tool for elegant expression?
Is it grammar? vocabulary?

>>12567223
>What would you recommend from him?
His novel Paradiso, and then his poems, if you're into that.
>What do you like a lot about him, Anon?
His language. I know it might sound cliché but that guy paints with words. As simple as that. Underrated.

how the fuck did he do it

>>12567101
This

>>12567252
Nice, I'll definitely check him out. Do you know if there are any English translations that do Paradiso some justice?

>>12567101
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

>>12567229
Yeah, I meant the way You spelled it, I just wrote his name how I pronounce it + how it would be phonetically translated into my language + I am in Germany on a German keyboard atm, so I have no idea where is what and i dont care.

Awesome book, though :>

>>12567204
Ignore him, anon. He's read neither of these books.

>22 replies
>no my diary desu
For shame, /lit/

>>12567307
Yea there's a translation by Gregory Rabassa (the only one that exists), who is a legendary translator known for have translated García Márquez, Cortázar, Vargas Llosa, Lispector, De Assis, among other authors. I'm not familiar with the Paradiso translation itself, but Rabassa has been praised by García Márquez and many critics, so you're in good hands, anon.

>>12567307
Yea there's a translation by Gregory Rabassa (the only one that exists), who is a legendary translator known for having translated García Márquez, Cortázar, Vargas Llosa, Lispector, De Assis, among other authors. I'm not familiar with the Paradiso translation itself, but Rabassa has been praised by García Márquez and many critics, so you're in good hands, anon.

>>12567448
Thank you for the informative reply, my friend. I look forward to reading it :)

>>12567325
What’s with Germans and smiley faces?

>>12567530
I ain't German, thankfully :>

Love the language, although it is a mouthful. I'm a fucking immigrant. :<

>>12567101
da waves by virgin woolf

>>12567101
A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James

have no idea how he can effortlessly tell the same story from so many perspectives.

>>12567101
Madame Bovary. Flaubert up to this age is something else.

>>12567101
Lolita.

>>12567561
obviously a slav

Malone Dies

>>12567101
Gravity’s Rainbow and I’m not meming

It was the first Pynchon I ever read, back when I didn’t obsess over reading “prerequisite” works before moving on to hard stuff. I just heard someone mention it as they’re favorite book, I admired the title, saw it in a quaint little indie bookstore a couple months later (the penguin cover with the blueprints) and decided why the fuck not I’ll try it! There was a lot of confusion and bananas but I really really loved it and would often write down particular sentences in my journal that I found beautiful. I wish I could go back to that blind innocence when I didn’t obsess over perfectly grasping everything and didn’t feel like I had to be “ready” to read a hard book before I started it.

Invisible Cities

>>12568056
Ah, I still feel this way about Paradise Lost. I've read the first 2 'books' but wasn't sure I was ready with the heavy allusion. Perhaps you may be on to something here...

>>12567561
Da.

This beautiful man right here

>>12567208
this

>>12567101

>Prose
Suttree
Moby Dick

>Structure
2666
Infinite Jest
Cities of the Red Night

>Both
Pale Fire
The Gift
Ulysses
Finnegans Wake

Atlas shrugged
Misery
Wheel of time series

reading the book of revelation in the original greek

Lolita and Col49

Despite Pynchon disavowing it, it’s still the best example of the possibilities of language to evoke unique emotions

>>12568064
> Invisible Cities
Came here to post that. Good taste anon

>>12567177
This and also nice dubs. Best book I've ever read

Book of the New Sun

Shakespearean tragedies.

>>12568375
Is Pale Fire the socially acceptable way of saying Lolita?

This
>>12567583
and this
>>12567567

Lolita really is something else
Morreste-me

Catch 22 desu
Also Thus Spake Zarathustra

American Psycho

it's performance art

>>12567101
In prose: Hugo's Les Miserables
Joyce's Portrait of the Artist and to a lesser extent Dubliners
Flaubert's Tentation of Saint Antony

Also to a lesser extent Giono's Hussard on the Roof for some reason
In poetry, many writers, but chiefly Baudelaire, Valéry and Shakespeare.


>>12568056
That obsession is easily stopped. Just say 'fuck it' and read what you feel like. Remember the best authors before 1700 often got inspiration from "the Ancients" without having read more of them than a modern highschooler who took Latin as elective.

>>12567241
The words that you are looking for are the grand style or the high style Cicero talks about it, used by Shakespeare and Milton

>>12567730
>>12568526
>>12568944
>>12570127
>Lolita
BASED true lovers of the best book ever written

Both have already been mentioned but Moby Dick and In Search of Lost Time were exactly this for me. After finishing both I had long periods of time where everything else just felt wrong.

>>12567101
Hamlet

>>12567101
Lolita no doubt. It changed how I viewed books forever. before I was a plotfag, but then I realised just how beautiful the words can be. LO-LI-TA.

Lolita, unironically

1. Lolita
2. Frisk
3. Neuromancer
4. The Iliad (yeh translated whatever)

I read Lolita for the first time last week.

There have never been a book that left such an impression on me. I actually drove 45 minutes to the nearest library so I could get a paper copy to read it again while taking notes to try to understand how the FUCK did he do it.

>>12570545
Read Ada next, Nabokov is extremely fun

>>12570552
Thanks, I was actually wondering where to go next with him. I'm reading Pale Fire right now. Completely different but still absolutely amazing.

>>12567101
Nine Princes in Amber

>>12568375
>Pale Fire
FOR FUCKS SAKE YOU MORONS WHO HAVEN'T READ PALE FIRE STOP NAMEDROPPING IT

>>12570686
Pale Fire isn't some underground gem, anon. Most people here have read it.

So Lolita is not just a meme?
Or are you guys memeing again?

I always thought all its appeal came from the taboo around pedophilia and stuff.

S-should I read it lads?

>>12570686
This isn't reddit my dude, this is an anonymous traditional Mongolian basket weaving forum. If people say they read Pale Fire, they most likely have. It's also a very well known book frequently featured in best-of lists everywhere.

>>12570697
No, I'm really surprised you don't realize it's genuinely one of the great novels.

>>12570697
That is part of the appeal but the book does many things exceptionally well

>>12570723
I've spent too much time on /lit/ and am no longer able to tell good books from garbage smut.

>>12570735
Garbage smut doesn't have prose like Lolita. The novel also deliberately becomes less erotic as it goes on, which is basically the opposite of an actual wank book

Pleasant Hell. I shouldn't even attempt to get into detail because I'll make it sound boring, but it's essentially a memoir about growing up in California during the 60s and 70s and the author's experience being a fat, lonely loser who missed out on all the crazy things happening around him at that time.

It expresses bitterness and solitude in the best style I've ever encountered. No attempt of making it sounds like he's experiencing some deep pain worthy of poetic introspection, just enough humor to soften the impact of some seriously, seriously depressing statements, and since the author found fame writing articles on military topics, that's the theme of most of his analogies for his thoughts and feelings, and it works. It sets a tone of besiegement, of being at constant war with society around you, which makes a great contrast with the relative banality of his actual experiences.

Anti-Christ by Nietzsche
There's something oddly poetic about his way of writing

This Vital Flesh

>>12567118
Finished that last week and holy shit it's fucking great. I'm finishing In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower and it's just as good if not better.

>>12567101
Only one book. The Silmarillion.

>>12568056
I came to it in a similar way, about 10 years ago. It was unreal, magical in a way, to actually be reading something I had up until then only a vague, undefined idea of what the perfect book would be. I’ve read it a number of times since then and somewhat regrettably I have to admit it’s lost its magic on me. But for that first experience it’ll always be my one true lit love.

>>12567101
Crime and Punishment

Those words are like butter

>>12571504
Dostoevsky is amazing but if you like the beauty of words you need to swallow the Nabokov pill as soon as possible.

>>12570434
Best book ever written? Maybe, but it certainly is the best written book ever

Hamsun. Closest someone's ever been to the sublime in Norwegian desu.

>>12570283
do you mean 'more' as in quantity or depth? The Baroque and Rennaisance writers read the latin and greeks extremely throroughly, this holds for every major English, Spanish, or Italian writer I can think of, my knowledge is weak on the Baroque French though

>>12567101
the peregrine and celine's style

P R O U S T
R
O
U
S
T

>>12567314
It becomes 500x better when you`ve read junky first. You ready junky and you`re just disgusted. You read naked lunch and the density of the junk is revealed. Really is a good book.

>>12567101
Historical fiction almost every writer write characters that think like modern people not realising that in other ages people had very different attitudes towards life, death, justice...

>>12570430
no let's say you 'discover' a new language
you come upon a few pages showcasing it's use for general purpose conversations and everyday things
how then will you determine that you can use this language for better expression and more complicated concepts than it's being used in those few pages

>>12572749
>pleb genre has hack writers writing shit characters
really activates the almonds

>>12570697
>I always thought all its appeal came from the taboo around pedophilia and stuff.
What's this, the 50s? The appeal comes from the narration and the prose, not the "taboo".

>>12572147
what?

>>12567101
Song of Myself by Whitman.

I am pretty bamboozled with notes from the underground

>>12567101

>>12567101
Dune lol

>>12570686

Yeah I have gain a lot of personal glory by claiming to have read a book on an anonymous sri lankan tea farming advice board.

Thus Spake Zarathustra really opened my eyes to power of allegory, even if applied in a secular context.
Beyond Good and Evil provided the best critique of the "compassion for the weak is always the answer" that seems prevalent and practically mandatory nowadays.

>>12571184
why did it lose its luster for you?

>>12568375
what is there about the structure of 2666?

I prefer the savage detectives

>>12575247
me too or the skating rink

>>12567576
read the savage detectives, my doggie

part 2 is the most impressive display of polyphony I've ever encountered. if any other anons know of books with an intense variegation of voices, lmk

>>12575284
bolaño does that in the skating rink, but in a smaller scale (3 narrators)

>>12575305
i've already read every bolaño work desu

The Recognitions
Gaddis just gets it right.

>>12567123
>>12567204
based reasonable and wholesome /lit/izen

Gravity's Rainbow, maybe Ulysses but in a less positive way

>>12567101
a novel it was called something like "her name was or a girl named/called ..." sucks that I can never remember that insightful book.

War & Peace

>>12567101
Mein Kampf

>>12567101
Appian's The Punic Wars. It was the first time I encountered that way of writing about history. Most statements weren't even true. Something is truly lost when you remove all mythical aspects of history.

>>12570723
Should I read it in English or Spanish?

>>12568944
>>12568375
Is Pale Fire actually good? Lolita was amazing, so I started reading PF and I thought the poem was good, but after that it started dragging on a little so I just dropped it

>>12572336
Quantity, number of authors and quality of scholarship certainly. They were often solid readers but a lot of misunderstanding were around. Didn't prevent them from taking the essence of what they read. And they seldom worried about "proper reading order" or silly stuff /lit/ obsesses about.

>>12577142
English

>>12567101
Catch-22. The way Heller uses repetition for humour is incredible.

>>12577142
Absolutely in English.
I read a bit through the French translation the other day, and even though Nabokov was fluent in French and took part in the translation, it's really not as good. Spanish would be even worse.

>>12567123
>the god of small things

it's just a book full of purple prose

>>12577510
The Spanish is decent but it must be read in English.

>>12567179
Lezama was interesting. But I prefer Alejo Carpentier. Both of them had a complex vocabulary. none of them made me feel that "you could write like this tho."

>>12568551
you too broski

>>12577549
What do you recommend from Carpentier?

>>12567101
this, unironically

Clockwork orange and Anthem by Rand

>>12577556
El reino de este mundo, los pasos perdidos, el siglo de las luces.

>>12570697

I avoided Lolita for so long because of the taboo subject etc, but seriously it is up there among the best books ever written.

You will laugh out loud and feel a sickening tension within the same page. The same phrase.

It really is a masterpiece, sounds like an empty platitude but I doubt any poster here is memeing.

>>12577673
gracias, anon.

>>12567101
Moby Dick