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/lit/ - Literature

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18120824 No.18120824 [Reply] [Original]

If im honest about it he's probably my favorite 20'th century author. More so then Nabokov, Joyce, Kafka or Mann. As a novelist, a short story writer and even as a stylist, he is clearer and more precise then any of them.

And he knows it. Of curse he looks smug.

>> No.18121346

I liked his Gertrude and Claudius book. it's up there with Anthony Burgess` Nothing Like The Sun

>> No.18121857

In The Beauty Of The Lilies was life changing.
It didn't change my faith, or my perception of religion but it changed my attitude towards the religious. Those early chapters about the father losing his faith were some of the most tender why I've read.

>> No.18121884

Literally who?

>> No.18122449

>>18121884
Updike. Famous to baby booker for a sort of Forest Gump kind of series of books. Except it’s just a regular guy.

His head must have been really tiny

>> No.18122459

>>18120824
Him and Saul Bellow are two novelists I don't really see discussed here, but I've been meaning to check out.

What's a good place to start with Updike?

>> No.18122458

>>18121884
Stick to comics.

>> No.18122471

>>18120824
I've only ever read a short story that was in the New Yorker by him. How similar is he to Bellow? because that's a name you often hear mentioned in the same breath.

>> No.18122497

>>18122459
Not that anon but I read the first Rabbit book an really liked it. I might buy Everymans Library’s Rabbit tetralogy

>> No.18122538

>>18122449
>baby booker
Boomers. Geez

>> No.18122621

>>18122459
>>18122471

He's a little like Bellow in that his work is somehow alive. Think Augie March or the first third of Humboldt's Gift. There an energy and an accuracy about life, particularly male life, that is unmatched even by great Europeans at the time. Still, i think he's got a wider scope then Bellow. He goes further but never looses his receptiveness.
Reading Roth's biography i was pleasantly surprised to see him admit that Updike may have been the better writer. And Roth was notoriously conceited.

As for recommendations, well it depends what you want from him
For the more poetic, observative stuff Of the Farm and In the Beauty of the Lilies and the later Rabbit's

Comedy:The Coup and Some of the Bech books

American life: Rabbit series, In the Beauty of the Lilies

Romance: Marry Me, Couples

>> No.18122697

>In The Beauty Of The Lilies
It might hit to close for comfort around here
Those early chapters with Teddy Growing up with no motivation, scared and friendless, almost by choice, while being too proud and simultaneously too much of a wet blanket for job are disconcertingly real.

Also those descriptions of the father looking at his bookshelves and seeing that it was for nothing still hunt me. You can lose your faith in anything, including fiction and philosophy. Not because of nihilism or trauma but just because it looses the magic.

>> No.18123335

>>18122697
too*
You absolute pillock

>> No.18123911

>>18122538
kek I thought you were making a pun