/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.12491823]

Is there a more demanding book out there? I feel like I need a break after 5 pages. It’s just pure, unadulterated poison. Like Notes from Underground on steroids. Has anyone actually finished it?

[Anonymous No.12491842]

>Robert Alterin his review of the book inThe New Republicwrote: "Some may seize on it as a postmodern masterpiece, but it is a bloated monster of a book. [...] The bloat is a consequence of sheer adipose verbosity and an unremitting condition of moral and intellectual flatulence. [...] The abjection of (Gass') hero seems less lived than written. It is an act of ventriloquism: behind the repulsive, potentially fascist narrator stands his critic, the novelist, presumably committed to humane, democratic values. But those values are nowhere intimated in the book, and what emerges is a kind of inadvertent complicity between author and protagonist. The supposedly critical novel becomes an enactment of bad faith."[5]
Gass BTFO

[Anonymous No.12491886]

>>12491842
Ouch that is brutal

[Anonymous No.12491951]

>>12491823
yes, over a thousand pages of sheer misery. gass wrote a book with no story but tried to write it nicely, stein wrote a book with no story and deliberately made it as grindingly unpleasant to read as possible
>Every one is always busy with it, no one of them then ever want to know it that every one looks like some one else and they see it. Mostly every one dislikes to hear it. It is very important to me to always know it, to always see it which one looks like others and to tell it. I write for myself and strangers. I do this for my own sake and for the sake of those who know I know it that they look like other ones, that they are separate and yet always repeated. There are some who like it that I know they are like many others and repeat it, there are many who never can really like it.

There are many that I know and they know it. They are all of them repeating and I hear it. I love it and I tell it, I love it and now I will write it. This is now the history of the way some of them are it.

[Anonymous No.12491957]

>>12491951
I’m loving that desu

[Anonymous No.12491984]

>>12491823
the whole point of the book, and i wish i was joking, is to say that any form of racism or anti-semitism occurs not because of socio-economic factors but because you have a small dick

it's the kind of reductive psychology you'd expect from those women's magazines, but here it's given to you in pretentious MFA prose from a tenured boomer

[Anonymous No.12492009]

>>12491984
>that's right you beta incel weenies!

[Anonymous No.12492027]

>>12491984
1. no it is not what the book is about, moron.
2. that is true

[Anonymous No.12492075]

>>12491951
yeah, I agree with this. I read about 350 pages of it and the thought of reading twice that again legitimately made me feel nauseous. The Tunnel is, for me at least, a uniquely oppressive book but It is very well written and there are loads of memorable sections in it (i.e. the Turk in Berlin, The house with thin walls, the description of the car crash late in the novel, Governali's daughter, The Part of Disappointed People, Culps Limericks, uncle Balt).

All I can remember from The Making of Americans is that David Hersland was a big man. he was a big man in the size of him. he was a big man in his eating and in the size of him and in his way of thinking. he was a big man. and his mother was a strong foreign woman in size and way of learning and his father was a weak foreign man with many children etc. etc.

[Anonymous No.12492266]

>>12491957
after just 100 pages it gets real fuckin old. plus entire sections seemingly repeat verbatim

[Anonymous No.12492463]

>>12491823
The first 50 - 100 pages are intentionally difficult. It's not representative of the whole book.

[Anonymous No.12492470]

>pure, unadulterated (x)
you aren't allowed to use this phrase for ten weeks

[Anonymous No.12492695]

>>12492075
>>12491951
how the fuck is gertrude stein famous
>inb4 diversity

[Anonymous No.12492726]

>>12492695
You know why

[Anonymous No.12492883]

>>12492695
Cubism and modernism in writing. Also no small part of it was that she literally bought her way into the art scene of the early 1900s. Not even trying to be anti-semitic, it's just true