/lit/ - Literature

>>21933006
If you're going to read James start with his early novels. Portrait of a Lady is the usual entry point and probably his best novel but if you're feeling adventurous you could read Roderick Hudson, which is a very early novel and more romantic. It's about an American sculptor who goes to Rome.

>>21933015
Why is that?
Could you briefly sketch out how you feel his fiction evolves over his lifespan?
I was thinking of starting with Portrait of a Lady though

>>21933006
Henry James is a little bit boring but stylistically he is the master of masters. I have never come across another writer so perfect as him when it comes to style. Melville just read Moby Dick first, sometimes the obvious answer is just best. I would also consider jude the obscure by Hardy and Lady chatterley’s lover by D H Lawrence.

Fuck I forgot that even though I want to have a rule about only English authors I was thinking that maybe I ought to read Madame Bovary as well
>>21933054
Thanks for the suggestions
I've put off reading Henry because of a feeling that I'd find him to be boring but I think I'll try to commit to Portrait

>>21933070
Just do it if its boring get it over with and move on. Its legitimately a great book honestly didnt blow me away just personally but glad I read it for sure.

>>21933020
Sure, the early novels are either tragedies or comedies and fairly formulaic stuff though with James' trademark psychological acuity and detachment, and somewhat strange, elaborate prose style. This period is generally agreed to culminate in Portrait of a Lady. Roderick Hudson, Confidence, and The American are my favorites but Washington Square is usually highly praised. These earlier novels are sort of lighthearted even when they're tragic and tend to have a very memorable atmosphere. The characters are extremely three dimensional and real seeming and you end up caring about them a lot but there is this kind of moral ambivalence about the way he writes, like a fatalism, like they're just doomed to play out their roles, rather than any sort of moralizing.

Then he wrote a couple long slightly politically tinged novels, the Bostonians(extremely funny) and Princess Casamassima(a bit weak). Following this he wrote like 10 novels nobody really cares about, though What Maisie Knew is pretty good. The awkward age(mostly dialogue) and the Sacred fount(ambiguous narrator) are both structurally sort of bizarre so they're noteworthy but these novels are generally like gloomier versions of his early ones which a bit more experimentation.

The late James is just 3 novels, Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, and the Golden Bowl. These are his "modernist" novels, with the Golden Bowl taking his meticulous detailing of moment to moment consciousness to an almost Joycean level, though much more conventionally written. They still feel like Henry James, particularly the Ambassadors, but the atmosphere or vibe for lack of a better term is very different than the early ones. Not as gloomy as the middle novels I would say but there is something depressing to me about them nonetheless. The charm and warmth of the early novels is not there, it's like he has lost hope about something idk. But these are the most artistically accomplished of his works I suppose, alongside Portrait. Some people think Golden Bowl goes a bit overboard and the first two are better.

He also wrote short fiction but I haven't read it. Turn of the screw is quite famous as a horror novella

>>21933103
Glad to have read this thank you

>>21933006
I'd recommend Henry Jame's short story, In the Cage. The novel follows an overly imaginative woman who works at a telegram office. If you like this novel by him, then pretty much what this >>21933103 anon said

>>21933006
I've always enjoyed what Ebert had to say about James in the reviews of adaptations of his books:
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-portrait-of-a-lady-1997
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/wings-of-the-dove-1997
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

>>21933006
Lawrence Durrell: "Would you rather read Henry James or be crushed to death by a great weight?"

Oscar Wilde: "Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty."

E. M. Forster: "So enormous is the sacrifice that many readers cannot get interested in James, although they can follow what he says (his difficulty has been much exaggerated), and can appreciate his effects. They cannot grant his premise, which is that most of human life has to disappear before he can do us a novel. . . . Maimed creatures can alone breathe in Henry James’s pages – maimed yet specialised."

Arnold Bennett: "It took me years to ascertain that Henry James's work was giving me little pleasure . . . In each case I asked myself: 'What the dickens is this novel about, and where does it think it's going to?' Question unanswerable! I gave up. Today I have no recollection whatever of any characters or any events in either novel."

T. S. Eliot: "He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it."

Marilyn "Clover" Adams: "It's not that he 'bites off more than he can chew' but he chews more than he bites off."

H. L. Mencken: "An idiot, and a Boston idiot to boot, than which there is nothing lower in the world."

Vladimir Nabokov: "He writes with a very sharp nib and the ink is very pale and there is very little of it in his inkpot . . . The style is artistic but it is not the style of an artist . . . Henry James is definitely for non-smokers. He has charm (as the weak blond prose of Turgenev has), but that’s about all."

More from Nabokov: "I have read (or rather reread) 'What Maisie Knew.' It is terrible. Perhaps there is some other Henry James and I am continuously hitting upon the wrong one?"

Even more from Nabokov: "Henry James is a pale porpoise."

Virginia Woolf: "Please tell me what merit you find in Henry James . . . We have his works here, and I read them, and can’t find anything but faintly tinged rose water, urbane and sleek, but vulgar, and as pale as Walter Lamb. Is there really any sense in it?"

Jorge Luis Borges: "Despite the scruples and delicate complexities of James his work suffers from a major defect: the absence of life."

Cormac McCarthy (from a New York Times interview): Proust and Henry James don’t make the cut. “I don’t understand them,” he says. “To me, that’s not literature. A lot of writers who are considered good I consider strange."

Jonathan Franzen: "I tried to start Portrait of a Lady last night, which I had read only in college . . . maybe it was too late to read anything, but I became so impatient with the multiple redundancies in the first paragraph that I cast it aside in anger. The first paragraph alone! You really have to be in the mood for Henry James."

And finally, Mark Twain said he would rather "be damned to John Bunyan's heaven" than read Henry James's novel The Bostonians.

I tried reading him but his prose is just so terrible and stilted. It doesn't have the punch of a Joyce or a Faulkner. I imagine it reads better in translation.

>>21934197
Please don't put that Franzen on the same place as those writers as if his opinion matters.

>>21934197
>Henry James is definitely for non-smokers.

>>21933006
Thomas Hardy is the man you're after

>>21933103
This is great, thanks

>>21934361
Lmao I check him out on Gutenberg and I find The Dynasts
This seems crazy but I kind of want to try reading it