ITT: Overrated hacks from your country

[Anonymous No.14656577]

I'll start: Brazil, Machado de Assis.

[Anonymous No.14656582]

>>14656577
How is the greatest Brazilian writer of all time overrated?

[Anonymous No.14656585]

>>14656582
João Guimarães Rosa is our GOAT, not this hack.

[Anonymous No.14656595]

>>14656577
why do you think he's an overrated hack op?

[Anonymous No.14656608]

>>14656595
Also want to know

[Anonymous No.14656611]

>>14656585
I don't believe you. There used to be a /lit/ chatroom with a Brazilian guy and he said Machado de Assis was the best.

[Anonymous No.14656621]

[Anonymous No.14656628]

Atwood for sure. Our best stuff is mostly by poets so most readers don't care about that. It is hard to rec Canadian novels. Often I found them to be overly particular to Canada and not very interesting.

[Anonymous No.14656629]

>>14656611
>everyone in Brazil thinks the same
fuck off

[Anonymous No.14656645]

>>14656577
Jonathan Franzen currently. He's way worse than Wallace. And he has the face of a dwarf, which is what he is, a dwarf in American literature, a nonentity, as Vlad would say.

[Anonymous No.14656651]

>>14656577
How is he a hack? Are you spiteful because you're forced to read him in high school?

[Anonymous No.14656706]

>>14656651
Not at all, I read him recently. Only half decent work is Brás Cubas. Was not impressed with the rest, which is forgettable. He's an extremely inflated writer. I don't think he is our best guy, but if so, then we're fucked.

[Anonymous No.14656767]

>>14656611
Machado de Assis was the best.
OP is just a dumb.
In a reading group on telegram, I sent some Brazilian books and everyone preferred Machado de Assis.

[Anonymous No.14656781]

>>14656767
Because they clearly don't know any better. Brazilians read mostly foreign literature and know jackshit about national literature. They're sheep simply choosing the thing they've been fed all their lives.

[Anonymous No.14656860]

bad writing, bad plots, no ideas

[Anonymous No.14656872]

>>14656860
nigger

[Anonymous No.14656873]

>>14656860
I hate his work so much.

[Anonymous No.14656880]

I hate this stupid fucking nigger

[Anonymous No.14656893]

>>14656577
argentine here. césar aira.

[Anonymous No.14657213]

>>14656577
I work with many Brazilians at my current job and they would disagree. You obviously have your own opinion of Machado de Assis which is fine but most of the Brazilians I speak with admire his work and would never consider him a hack. However, the Brazilians I speak to are educated physicians and engineers so only one segment of the people.

[Anonymous No.14657224]

>>14657213
>>14656781

[Anonymous No.14657347]

Any alternatives to Aira?

[Anonymous No.14657349]

>>14657347
Alan Pauls.

[Anonymous No.14657379]

>>14656880
he might honestly be one of the most retarded people who have ever lived

[Anonymous No.14657416]

Thanks! Where to start with Pauls?

[Anonymous No.14657441]

>>14656577

Bong here - it has to be Austen or Dickens. I actually loathe most Angloid lit from the 19th century, it's as dry as a fucking bone.

[Anonymous No.14657465]

>>14656577
He’s not overrated, he’s the only thing we’ve got.

[Anonymous No.14657468]

>>14657441
Seconding Austen, Dickens is aight though i'll never forgive him for the time I wasted reading Great Expectations.

[Anonymous No.14657469]

>>14657465
>who is Guimarães Rosa

[Anonymous No.14657476]

>>14657441
>>14657468
I just got Oliver Twist, what am I in for, lads? I remember watching the 2005 film as a kid and thinking it was good.

[Anonymous No.14657502]

>>14657416
Wasabi and The Past.

[Anonymous No.14657541]

>>14656577
France, Montaigne. Ses essais sont inintéressants, d'un point de vue à la fois philosophique et littéraire. Il ne savait pas philosopher, dire une chose et son contraire sans analyser le fond d'un problème ne montre pas la vacuité de la philosophie. Puis ce n'est pas parcequ'il écrit en ancien français qu'il écrit bien.

[Anonymous No.14657553]

>>14657541
Think of him as your uncle talking about random topics, not as capital-P Philosophy, mon ami.

[Anonymous No.14657565]

>>14656621
Definitely not. Murakami on the other hand...

[Anonymous No.14657995]

>>14657469
A poor man’s James Joyce

[Anonymous No.14658051]

>>14657553
C'est toujours complètement inintéressant et de prose moyenne.

[Anonymous No.14658054]

I don't consider Machado de Assis a hack, but he is definitely overrated.

[Anonymous No.14658085]

>>14656621
Overrated, sure. But that's on the critics for touting him as the Proust of the 21st century.
A hack? No.

[Anonymous No.14658239]

>>14656860
but he was so handsome

[Anonymous No.14658258]

he's not terrible but holy shit is he overrated, especially in America

[Anonymous No.14658428]

>>14656880
I want to perform a late term abortion on this hack.

[Anonymous No.14658454]

>>14656860
Are you one of those muh prose retards?
At most he's a bit overrated. Sartre is much worse

[Anonymous No.14659244]

>>14658454
Sartre is 100x worse, yes.

[Anonymous No.14659262]

>>14656577
he may not be the best, but to call him a hack only shows you are retarded.

[Anonymous No.14659284]

Sounds like another thread full of people shitting on authors without giving concrete reasons why they aren't good.

[Anonymous No.14659307]

Go fuck yourself, OP. Machado was much more prolific than Guimarães Rosa. Fuck, Ariano Suassuna is much more of a GOAT in terms of actually understanding the sertão and Brasil in general. I like the language in Grande Sertão, it's an amazing feat of writing. But let's not get ahead of ourselves here.

[Anonymous No.14659325]

>>14659307
Prolific doesn't mean better. Stephen King is more prolific than Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky combined.

[Anonymous No.14659328]

Famous for one reason

[Anonymous No.14659335]

>>14656577
>>14656781
And I probably know a lot more about literature, our national literature included, than you do.

Machado de Assis was an immensely great writer, a master of prose and irony with a rare command of Portuguese syntax and rhetorical devices which, alongside a highly succinct yet diversified vocabulary that could borrow from the latest French magazine as expertly as it did from Camões and Herculano, helped to establish him as one of the major stylists of the language. Furthermore, his injection of formal humor (by which I mean humor based on literary form) and surrealist disorder into our prose was important in establishing for the first time a firm and fruitful relationship between English and Brazilian literature, something that previous writers were unable to do, limited as they were to French translations of the vilest quality.
The talent and greatness of his literary heirs, from Manuel Bandeira to Cyro dos Anjos and Carlos Drummond and even the Campos brothers, is yet another proof that his talents were far, very far above the average for a novelist, even a 19th-century one.

Whether he is our ''best'' or not, it's a matter of personal taste. This ''who is the best?'' game is devoid of merit and empty of seriousness.

[Anonymous No.14659374]

>>14659335
He's only memed in Brazil because he had nigger blood and was one the first half decent writers in the country. In reality he's nothing special, even in a Brazilian context. At an international level, he's a nonentity. Someone like Chekhov or Borges say more in a single short story than Machado in his entire work.

[Anonymous No.14659432]

>>14656577
/x/ the author, the majority of his books are pulp magazine-tier and conspiracy bullshit.
>inb4 Colombian

[Anonymous No.14659451]

>>14659432
lol I give you the Mexican equivalent. Dude wrote some book about a bullshit haunted house or something that turned out to be false. All of Mexico still laughs at the meme to this day.

[Anonymous No.14659464]

>>14656577
Easy one

[Anonymous No.14659470]

>>14659464
that's your only good writer, ruskyfag.

[Anonymous No.14659502]

>>14659374
Are you joking?

I have read many short stories by Chekhov (in translation) and nearly all the literary works of Borges, and Machado is clearly a great writer, even when compared to them. In fact, Machado, as far as I can see, is almost as great a prose stylist as both, and here and there even better, although his moral understanding of literary character and human psychology does not go as deep as that of Chekhov (except perhaps when it comes to cruelty - Machado was a master of cruelty), and his philosophical understanding is not as original as that of Borges.

Saying he's ''memed'' (i.e., praised by the most reputable critics and immensely love by our greatest writers) because he had "nigger" blood (which is absolute nonsense, as his works barely have anything to do with slavery - as Harold Bloom said, you can read an entire book by Machado and think he's white if you don't look at his photograph) is simply proving to the whole world the immense depth of your own ignorance and pretense.

Maybe you dislike Machado's morals (or lack thereof, which is what Rosa mainly disliked about him). Maybe you dislike his characters. Maybe you even dislike the way he conducts the narrative. But calling a language stylist and humorist as good as him a ''hack'' who is ''memed'' for being a ''nigger'' is simply unjustified nonsense. Even Machado's poetry has some high moments which are worthy of our best artisans.

[Anonymous No.14659504]

>>14659335
>Campos brothers
Get out.

[Anonymous No.14659512]

>>14659374
You're just being contrarian and posting for "le epic racist meme internet points". That's why this country will never be a cultural entity: its middle-class is entirely composed of americucks, people who wish they were born in some shitty Tennessee town so they can LARP as rural nazis. Fuck you, you piece of fucking shit. Jesus, I bet you're from the South or São Paulo too, which makes it even worse.

[Anonymous No.14659541]

>>14659512
Tennessee is indeed better and richer than Brazil. Brazil is objectively the worst country in South America. Literally Africa 2.0

[Anonymous No.14659550]

>>14659451
Anon, are you sure we aren't talking about the same author.

[Anonymous No.14659555]

>>14659504
Tell that to their admirers Roman Jakobson, Julio Cortazar, Umberto Eco and Octavio Paz.

Anyway, I deeply disagree with the poetic project of the Campos brothers, although I do admire their condensative competence in poetic translation. (And yes, I did read Tolentino's somewhat justified diatribe). Haroldo also wrote some poems which are genuinely good and much less 'concrete' in form; Campos, on the other hand... Never read anything good by him except some his translations (such as that great translation of Andrew Marvell).

>>14659541
Tennessee is better and richer than Homer's Greece. So what?

[Anonymous No.14659561]

>>14659555
>Tennessee is better and richer than Homer's Greece.
Nah, just better than Brazil. Greece is richer than both (I meant cultural and historical richness btw)

[Anonymous No.14659575]

>>14659550
kek the resemblance is uncanny

[Anonymous No.14659576]

>>14659328


t. Bad taste

[Anonymous No.14659585]

>>14659502
He's just passable at best. All this fuzz about his being Brazil's GOAT is nonsense. He's extremely overrated.

[Anonymous No.14659589]

>>14659328
Another author only extolled only because of their nigger genes.

[Anonymous No.14659644]

>>14659561
Then Tennessee is not better than BR. Maybe it is per capita, but definitely not overall (Brazil has 200 million people), and probably not per capita - at least as far as I know, I am not very familiar with Tennessee - if you consider local places in BR like Rio, Recife or Belo Horizonte, which have been our main cultural towns.

>>14659585
>GOAT

Literature isn't a sport. It's a craft.

Also, repeating a lie 99 times won't make it true.

You can say what you want, but you offer no analysis and no depth.

Meanwhile, so that /lit/ might know just how rare, uncommon and even unjustified your views are, I will post some of the praise Machado received. You don't need to go far: it's from Wikipedia.

>Machado de Assis was included on American literary critic Harold Bloom's list of the greatest 100 geniuses of literature, alongside writers such as Dante, Shakespeare and Cervantes. Bloom considers him the greatest black writer in Western literature; this is based on United States's conceptions of race, which are not the same in Brazil,[27] where he is considered mulato.[28]

>His works have been studied by critics in various countries of the world, such as Giuseppe Alpi (Italy), Lourdes Andreassi (Portugal), Albert Bagby Jr. (US), Abel Barros Baptista (Portugal), Hennio Morgan Birchal (Brazil), Edoardo Bizzarri (Italy), Jean-Michel Massa (France), Helen Caldwell (US), John Gledson (England), Adrien Delpech (France), Albert Dessau (Germany), Paul B. Dixon (US), Keith Ellis (US), Edith Fowke (Canada), Anatole France (France), Richard Graham (US), Pierre Hourcade (France), David Jackson (US), G. Reginald Daniel (US), Linda Murphy Kelley (US), John C. Kinnear, Alfred Mac Adam (US), Victor Orban (France), Daphne Patai (US), Houwens Post (Italy), Samuel Putnam (US), John Hyde Schmitt, Tony Tanner (England), Jack E. Tomlins (US), Carmelo Virgillo (US), Dieter Woll (Germany) and Susan Sontag (US).[29]

>Machado's literary style has inspired many Brazilian writers. His works have been adapted to television, theater and cinema. In 1975 the Comissão Machado de Assis ("Machado de Assis Commission"), organized by the Brazilian Ministry of Education and Culture, organized and published critical editions of Machado's works, in 15 volumes. His main works have been translated into many languages. Great 20th-century writers such as Salman Rushdie, Cabrera Infante and Carlos Fuentes, as well as the American film director Woody Allen, have expressed their enthusiasm for his fiction.[32] Despite the efforts and patronage of such well-known intellectuals as Susan Sontag, Harold Bloom, and Elizabeth Hardwick, Machado's books—the most famous of which are available in English in multiple translations—have never achieved large sales in the English-speaking world and he continues to be relatively unknown, even in comparison with other Latin American writers.

Good night. It's useless discussing with someone who's full of pretense and empty of knowledge.

[Anonymous No.14659674]

>>14659644
These people have extremely negative views of anything Brazilian, they just want us to be a Second Rate US and that’s it. There’s truly no point in arguing with such people, as their cuckoldry is impossible to heal.

[Anonymous No.14659688]

>>14656577
Thomas Keneally

[Anonymous No.14659714]

>>14659644
>appealing to authority
Yea, pleb confirmed.

[Anonymous No.14659736]

>>14659674
Ideally Brazil should be a country for the Portuguese-blooded people. Natives are also welcome, but with due distance. But niggers have absolutely no business in this place. That's what we want. A clean Brazil. This nation is a failed state because of this fatal flaw. You aren't seeing the problem.

[Anonymous No.14659944]

>>14657468
That's what you get for having... great expectations.

[Anonymous No.14659970]

>>14659736
Yeah, talk more, italio-German-Japanese southerner.

[Anonymous No.14660004]

>>14657441
I somewhat agree.

I do not loathe that literature, but it is worse than what came before and worse than what came after.

In the 19th century literature became a mass-product, and its quality fell: writers were encouraged to write long books filled with useless scenes and even more useless characters, as well as long but not necessarily better sentences. Their themes became more and more mundane, to the point that some writers like Jane Austen seem to be simply infantile, as if she had no true preoccupation with higher matters.

18th century writers were better because they had a sense for the adventurous and the marvelous, which makes their books more entertaining, closer to contemporary streams like magical realism, existentialism and post-modernism. Voltaire, Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe and others belong to this tradition, which was mainly influenced by the greatest of all novelists, Miguel de Cervantes, as well as by the Arabian Nights orientalism fad, and the travel books about this fascinating world of ours, which was still being discovered - all of which are very superior and richer sources of mystery and inspiration for writers than the love affairs of the bourgeoisie. Furthermore, because the novel was in its developments as a form there was much more room for exploration in that regard, and you can clearly see this if you consider the fact that the best 18th century novels tend to be always different from each other, while the best 19th century English novels tend to be always boringly similar, with few exceptions.

After the second half of the 19th century it became increasingly clear that literature would need to occupy itself with deeper, philosophical questions and with the way the conscious - as well as the unconscious - mind operates in the urbanized, industrialized and atomized civilization of our times. The first to notice this were the Russians (although Stendhal and Flaubert were worthy predecessors), and they quickly and easily surpassed their contemporaries to the point that a short book like Notes from the Underground carries many times the literary force of a book like Great Expectations, a 500-page tome filled with common morality, caricaturesque scenes and superficial ideas. Now if you take a book like Brothers Karamazov or Anna Karenina, then well, it belongs to an entirely different world - a world with real people in it!

During the 20th century the philosophical, psychological, exploratory and adventurous came to prominence once again, and thank goodness for that. Can you imagine if Borges had written his books in the 19th century? Instead of Ficciones, we'd probably have some 700-page love story between a well-read and sensitive English immigrant and the young wife of a dangerous gaucho warrior, while looming in the background would be a deadly civil war, characterized by many evil adjectives, in the pampas of Argentina (characterized by many large, open adjectives). I feel nauseous thinking of it!

[Anonymous No.14660083]

>>14656645
>Thought it was Stephen King on first sight

[Anonymous No.14660091]

>>14656860
Modiano is much worse

[Anonymous No.14660208]

>>14659970
All preferable ethnicities over nigs.

[Anonymous No.14660537]

>>14659944
kek

[Anonymous No.14660583]

>>14658258
I sorta agree. Huck Finn may be one of the greats but you read some of his other stuff like Letters From the Earth and its just terrible

[Anonymous No.14660588]

>>14660583
what about his short stories?

[Anonymous No.14660598]

>>14659328
She is a legitimately good black female novelist, alongside Zora Neale Hurston and Gloria Naylor.

[Anonymous No.14660611]

>>14659464


t. jew

[Anonymous No.14660614]

>>14656767
any way to get added to one of these

[Anonymous No.14660616]

>>14660598
Literally who

[Anonymous No.14660618]

>>14656577
Hemingway

[Anonymous No.14661095]

>>14660091
yeah Modiano doesn't even exist as a 'writer'

>>14656872
>>14658454
frankly I just read some of his works recently because I had a decent opinion on him, and realized he was below average on every aspect.
Sartre may be as bad as a writer, but there's the whole philosophical part of his work that kinda saves him.
Praising Camus while not reading him in french is like praising Shakespeare while reading translations only. Doesn't make much sense imho.

[Anonymous No.14661105]

Russia Pushkin overrated nigger

[Anonymous No.14661708]

>>14658454
I would have agreed 40 years ago. Sartre is even worse, but he is not as overrated anymore. He has been on a slow but steady decline of influence for decades. People have long stopped referencing his works. He'll become 'that writer that people took seriously in the mid 20th century but whose works haven' t been edited in ages'.
For some reason Camus endures time much better. The chad pictures probably have something to do with it.

[Anonymous No.14661766]

Russia Tolstoevsky

[Anonymous No.14661772]

>>14661766
Not Russian but I agree. They are great but should compose something like 30% of Russian literature discussion, not 90%.

[Anonymous No.14661854]

>>14656621
Look at those Aryan eyes.

[Anonymous No.14661950]

>>14659464
t. french

[Anonymous No.14661985]

>>14656577
Retard

[Anonymous No.14661997]

Orwell and Huxley. They can't write for shit and their ideas and predictions are good but not really worthy of being circlejerked into oblivion.
>>14659464
All Russians I know consider him a hack.

[Anonymous No.14662005]

>>14661766
Death of the Dead was great

[Anonymous No.14662018]

>>14661708
Camus endures time better because he never committed himself to such an inhuman view of the Self, and didn't align himself with Stalinists and Maoists. He wrote essays and novels with some philosophical dabbling. Being and Nothingness is the reason Sartre will be dismissed more and more with each passing year. Anything he attempted to do in that was done better in Heidegger and Kierkegaard.

[Anonymous No.14662042]

this nigga.

[Anonymous No.14662662]

[Anonymous No.14662696]

>>14656893
>imagine actually thinking that one of the finest Spanish language writers of the 21st century that the masses are completely ignorant of is overrated

>>14659328
based niggerwoman hater
Imagine actually giving her a Nobel and ignoring Maryse Conde who is a much better niggerwoman

>>14661766
Based and I hope you read Gogol and Turgenev instead

[Anonymous No.14662749]

>>14656860
t. Sartre

[Anonymous No.14662879]

If there's any proof for why /lit/ should be abandoned it's this thread.

[Anonymous No.14662896]

Petőfi is for gigabrainlets.

[Anonymous No.14662935]

>>14660004
Cringe, and somewhat symptomatic of an average c/lit/ who confuses the mere presence of a philosophical element in fiction for profundity.

[Anonymous No.14663207]

>>14662042
Bet you haven’t read anything by him, Freundchen.
Unterhaltung deutscher Ausgewanderter and Die Leiden des jungen Werthers are utter shit tho, I’ll give you that. On the other hand, Wahlverwandtschaften and Faust I + II are pure kino

[Anonymous No.14663218]

>>14662935
No, I don't.

The mere presence is only the minimum (when it comes to the philosophical novel, that is - one can write other sorts of novels with no philosophical elements in it).

For instance, there are some philosophical elements in Lord of the Flies, but I think they are somewhat commonplace; meanwhile, Borges is truly original, having created concepts which work like thought experiments in order to vividly show us something we hadn't thought about before.

[Anonymous No.14663232]

>>14662879
Leave then. Nigs are not welcome here.

[Anonymous No.14663280]

We don't have that in Spain.
ANY relevant spanish author is a genius, and that's something you will have to live with, rest of the world.

[Anonymous No.14664554]

>>14659470
Tolstoy... Gorky.... Pushkin

[Anonymous No.14664638]

>>14656577
anyone not named herman melville