/lit/ - Literature

>>1958227
Don't.

Start with this anecdote:

Gertrude Stein sent a manuscript, written in English, to a publisher (in America, I think) while she was in Paris. The publisher was so baffled by what he had before him that he sent a representative to Paris to find out if Gertrude Stein even spoke the language.

That, right there, is your starting point.

>Where do I start with Gertrude Stein?

Three Lives, Tender Buttons, and The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas.

If you enjoy those, then read The Making of Americans.

>>1958238

I find this anecdote amusing and endearing.

This is more of a sort of, should I start, rather than, where should I start, but:

Toni Morrison.

Some things give me the impression she's just a good Alice Walker, cynically targeting the Oprah Winfrey crowd. Other things, the Noble Prize in particularly, maybe some of the things Michael Siverblatt has said, tell me she might be better.

Give me your definitive opinion on her, and a book if you think its worth my time.

>>1958311

Well, they have to award SOMEONE the Nobel prize every year, so of course some winners aren't as great as others. But even the minor winners are still pretty good. I'd say give it a shot.

>>1958311
I had to read The Bluest Eye for women's studies, and it was chilling as fuck. It borrows more from The Color Purple than I'd like, but I think it was worth my time.

>>1958347
WAIT FUCK!!!!

The Bluest Eye came out before The Color Purple. Scratch that.

>>1958336
>>1958347
>>1958311
>>1958350

Okay, here's a quick intro to Toni Morrison and Alice Walker.

Alice Walker is the political one. She comes out of the feminist movement, basically, and it's all about talking through "issues", sort of like if Oprah were an adjunct professor at some D-list liberal college like Middlebury. Her novels are quite obviously about Oprah topics. To get a quick sense of Walker at her best and worst, read the story "Advancing Luna--and Ida B. Wells". It basically sets up an interesting plot in the first 2 pages. Then it abandons all interest in the sort of things that fiction does to record what Alice Walker herself thinks about the plot that she set up in the first 2 pages. It's not really literature. It's more like manipulative leftist essay-writing. It is what Keats would describe as "writing with its hands in your pockets"---i.e., political writing, or writing with an explicit political purpose. As with the whole "only lesbians understand the clitoris" message in The Color Purple. (Which was turned into a Broadway Musical with Oprah as producer).

Toni in next post....

>>1958356

Toni Morrison is the more "artistic" one. And her artistic bona fides are slightly more august than Alice Walker's anyway.....Morrison began her career as a book editor, and then wrote her own fiction. In other words, she paid her dues in the world of New York fiction-writing and was trusted by numerous other writers to edit their own work, before she ever tried writing her own.

Morrison's own novels DO demonstrate an interest in the craft of fiction, mostly to write works that are basically Faulknerian with a little Garcia-Marquez salsa for cosmetic purposes only. But she is political.

Her early fiction, which is the only stuff honestly worth reading, is her most Faulknerian and her best-----if you want to read Toni Morrison, start with Song of Solomon. It's better than The Bluest Eye.

>>1958373

But with something like Beloved-----well, you don't need to read past the dedication. She dedicates the book to "the 60 million or more" which is a made-up number purposefully intended to suggest that African-American Slavery was 10 times worse than the Holocaust. Why, you ask, would Morrison be engaged in such nickel-and-diming over the extent of victimhood as to frontload her book that way? Because THAT's the way Morrison is political, and THAT is the limitation on her fiction from "Beloved" onward. She basically suffers from the same limitation that August Wilson (her rough contemporary, and probably the only other African-American writer in her generation to match her importance, the rest being vastly overrated) had----it's hard, in her most recent works, to find a white person portrayed sympathetically, or at all, or as anything more than a looming offstage stereotype. In other words, the end result of identity politics is that Toni Morrison tastes the might of what Herbert Marcuse called "repressive tolerance", and fights white bigotry by indulging her own.

Also, I imagine that currently she regrets having referred to Bill Clinton as "our first black President".

>>1958375
>Bill Clinton as "our first black President".

But he was our fist black president.. pic related it's Bill.

>>1958375
Awesome, thanks anon.

I thought there would be some troublesome political baggage with her, but I didn't want to be too critical of stuff like Beloved, when I knew she was highly considered.

And, Song of Solomon seemed like a good entrypoint, although I was afraid it might come off as Updike-esque. Now that I know, it's got some magical realist elements, I think I'll give it a shot.

>>1958402

Yeah, honestly, Caracalla, you've got the gist of it already.

Most people I know, if they have enjoyed a Toni Morrison novel, enjoyed Song of Solomon precisely because of the magic-realist elements, most of which also have real research behind them into African folk-myths and magic.