The Tunnel

[Anonymous No.12032781]

What are your thoughts on the most beautiful, cost complex, most disturbing novel to be published in Michael Silverblatt's lifetime?

It is definitely a contender for most beautiful and most disturbing, but I didn't find it complex at all. Did I miss something?

[Anonymous No.12032905]

I haven't read the whole thing, but I imagine when Silverblatt says it's complex he's talking about its form and structure. I don't know enough about it to say anything too enlightening, but from paging around though it I did notice that different sections of the book are written in very different ways and each part has its own set of themes and symbols that unify it. And these symbols and themes are themselves unified throughout the work as a whole. Figuring out these relationships and combing out what Gass puts in there on a sentence by sentence basis is a complicated task.

[Anonymous No.12032944]

>>12032905
To what end though? Isolation, lies, tunnels, bigotry, so what?

[Anonymous No.12033114]

>>12032781
this is what happens when you're a good writer and you're too dull to have anything worth writing about

[Anonymous No.12033182]

>>12032781
>most beautiful
Eh, not really. His descriptions are very accurate and sometimes funny, but hes not describing anything other than his childhood and some stuff from a pretty mundane guys life.
>cost complex
No, not really.
>most disturbing
Light Nazism, light child abuse, a tiny smear of pedophilia, and that's about it. Not really that disturbing.
By all means not a bad book, defiantly enjoyable to read, but not the best ever or anything.

>>12032905
>form and structure
It's a book. The form is the pages and the structure is the binding. Anything else is just pretentious.

[Anonymous No.12033204]

>>12033114
>here's a list of cool stuff I've done
Whoa, great book there

[Anonymous No.12033301]

>>12033182
>It's a book. The form is the pages and the structure is the binding. Anything else is just pretentious.
bitch

[Anonymous No.12033341]

Just put it down for the second time, just over a hundred pages in. Don't think I'll return to it. It just seems like pretentious wank with very little substance to it. Like a boring, less gifted version of Nabokov.

[Anonymous No.12034104]

>>12033204
>cool
Hwat

[Anonymous No.12034119]

>>12032781
>Michael Silverblatt
absolutely based

[Anonymous No.12034132]

>>12034119
That guy is literally a walking parody of himself.

[Anonymous No.12034135]

>>12032781
it's a book

[Anonymous No.12034152]

>>12033182
based literal /pol/shitter

[Anonymous No.12034219]

>>12033341
I just put it down for a third time, finished the whole thing in an orgy of the will. I return to it every year on October 27th, for personal reasons. It's art of the highest order and its substance has substance. He has the philosophy, the mathematics, the metaphors and architectonics melted together into a demonic marble cathedral of human suffering.

[Anonymous No.12034272]

>>12034219
The suffering mainly being that of the reader's.

Please elaborate though. I'm generally quite skeptical of anglo maximalism. The whole implicit notion that there should be some sort of necessary relationship between the density and quality of a work seems to me utterly bizarre.

[Anonymous No.12034327]

>It's a book. The form is the pages and the structure is the binding. Anything else is just pretentious.

damn.....

[Anonymous No.12035274]

>>12032905
>different sections of the book are written in very different ways and each part has its own set of themes and symbols that unify it
I noticed this in a few stories from in the heart of the heart of the country and because of the jigsaw-decoding process gass demands, they were the least enjoyable ones in the book. You read most of the tunnel, does the fact that you gave up on it stand to prove that you found it just as unrewarding as well? I feel like at times he isn't writing for anyone other than his writers guild friends, the academics, analysts and critics. Though I loved omensetter's luck I fear he's abandoned that space where the work threads lines of decipherability down into labyrinthine murk like joyce's dubliners to uly. Anyways, on a scale from 1 to 10 how much did you like it / do you ever plan on picking it up again?

[Anonymous No.12035307]

I made it 5 pages. I simply don't like that tone of nihilistic, resentful writing in anything. I do however respect Gass' as an intellectual and literary scholar despite his immense personal cuckholdry and have enjoyed some of his nonfiction, though some is also... ethereal? Maybe I'll get back into the Tunnel but has anyone read On Being Blue? Can't find shit about it online.

[Anonymous No.12035323]

>>12034272
I’m not that poster, first off, but I’ll just give my view. Artists and intellectuals are sometimes quite morose, melancholy, bitter, self-pitying. The whole book is a sort of extended and over-the-top elaboration of this in an extremely beautiful style at times. Of course, a normal person may go, “What the fuck is the point of such self-centered depression and bitterness?” That’s a fair point I’ve agreed with many times while reading it. I think Gass is one of those rare writers called a “writer’s writer”, a writer for other writers. The average reader will not really get into it. But for writers interested in form itself, the possibilities of language and trying to baroquely and philosophically write about the mundanest details of modern life, trying to make the ordinary hyper-aesthetic, you may see something interesting and rewarding in it.

For a fair amount of passages of The Tunnel, I actually DID feel, “Jesus, what’s the point of this shit? This is so annoying and emotionally limited, focused on bitterness and dark humor and detailed descriptions of mediocre suburban life.” On the other hand, there were also passages so beautifully written I actually almost started crying at how beautifully written it was and thought Gass was an angel, even though it was about stupid shit like how small the narrator’s penis is or how much he hates his father, or just descriptions of scenery.

What do we read literature for? Some like interesting stories, some like beautiful writing itself and an eye for detail, some like philosophical meaning, some like a deep emotional connection with characters or deep emotional impact. I think we shouldn’t be so harsh about people who prefer to focus on some of these aspects to the detriment of others. I like reading really plot-driven simpler books sometimes just for fun, detective novels and whatnot, but I also like authors like Proust or Gass or Joyce where you can just chew on the potential great beauty of language itself. Some authors can combine great beauty of style AND compelling plots AND deep characters and emotional impact in a balanced way, being very good in all, but they’re rare. Sometimes you make sacrifices to focus more on one aspect over the others.

[Anonymous No.12035325]

>>12033182
>Imagine being this retarted.

[Anonymous No.12035338]

>>12035323
>Some authors can combine great beauty of style AND compelling plots AND deep characters and emotional impact in a balanced way, being very good in all, but they’re rare.

Such as...

[Anonymous No.12035344]

>>12035338
My opinion is that the plays attributed to William Shakespeare sometimes succeed in this pretty damn well. And it makes me understand why people hush about how he’s a superhuman writer, the Mozart or Bach or Beethoven of literature. I think you have to have genuine taste to see this, though.

[Anonymous No.12035349]

>>12035344
*gush not hush

[Culp No.12035364]

I once went to bed with anon,
But it wasn't terribly fun.
For a writer named Gass
Had once raped his ass,
And the tunnel was too vast and too long.

[Anonymous No.12035724]

>>12034272
That's one pathetic zinger you shot off, cousin.

It's not maximalism. The book is more big than long. Like Infinite Jest, it has a large typeface, though unlike IJ, it uses it for design purposes not to pad the page count.

As for density, it's pudding and cream—one of the smoothest reads out there.

[Anonymous No.12035732]

>>12035307
The author, around halfway in, gets out of the nihilism. Get the fuck off lit Professor Five Pages.