/lit/ - Literature

>>20482613
Who?

>>20482613
Start with The New York Trilogy, but I very heavily enjoyed and recommend 4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster.

>>20482613
His best works are The Oracle Night and The Book of Ilusions

>>20482613
He has one of the most pretentious opening sentences ever:
>I am alone in the dark, turning the world around in my head as I struggle through another bout of insomnia, another white night in the great American wilderness.

>>20482899
kino

I really enjoy his more serious and/or realistic works like The New York Trilogy, Oracle Night, and Leviathan, but I have little to no patience for his kookier, lighter novels like Moon Palace, The Music of Chance, or The Brooklyn Follies. He's a pretty good essayist, too.

>>20482899
>that opening
>pretentious
Either you are an ESL, or have read no more than 10 books on your life.

>>20482946
First cliché: the brooding narrator who is in the dark, thinking deeply about the world
Second cliché: he has insomnia, as popularized in the 90's by Fight Club etc.
Third cliché: He's in the American wilderness, translation: Look at me, I'm an important writer! I write about contemporary America! I'm a social observer and I have to spell it out in the first sentence

>First cliché: the brooding narrator who is in the dark, thinking deeply about the world
>Second cliché: he has insomnia, as popularized in the 90's by Fight Club etc.
>Third cliché: He's in the American wilderness, translation: Look at me, I'm an important writer! I write about contemporary America! I'm a social observer and I have to spell it out in the first sentence

>>20482975
>I have no means to respond but I have a .jpg file

Having not read the work, that sentence most definitely sounds pretentious as hell to me, however it is possible the rest of the work can potentially redeem it.

>pretentious
Wish brainlets would stay in their sci-fi fantasy general.

>>20482967
>First cliché: the brooding narrator who is in the dark, thinking deeply about the world
A narrator by definition must think deeply about the world, otherwise they would be a poor narrator.
>Second cliché: he has insomnia, as popularized in the 90's by Fight Club etc.
Because insomnia is part of Fight Club does not make it a cliché.
>He's in the American wilderness
The idea of America being wild is deeply ingrained in its history and its culture. To ignore this would be cliché.

>>20483244
A cliché is an idea that has become overused to the point of losing its original meaning or effect. You can use the idea of a man in the dark, thinking deeply about the world. But saying "I am a man in the dark, thinking deeply about the world" is clichéd. The effect is unintentionally comical, depending on your reading experience, since it's such an overused literary trope. A writer could use the same idea but with a different phrasing and a more subtle approach and be more succesful.

He’s a chill read. He rarely returns to anything so you can just plow through and enjoy the weird aesthetic quality, the interesting turns of phrase etc. I appreciate that he has his own weird lane, somewhere between classic American lit and avant-garde euro writing. All the criticisms people lob at him are completely true but he’s still good.

>>20482613
The one about his son injecting heroin to his newborn and then offing himself LMAO