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/lit/ - Literature

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18325712 No.18325712 [Reply] [Original]

i thought this was just a meme but it's blowing me away. the gassman's prose scratches an itch that otherwise only nabokov can claw at

>> No.18325831

>>18325712
>can claw at
well, you're not learning anything

>> No.18325864

One of the best books ever written, I think

>> No.18325877

>>18325831
im esl

>> No.18325889

I'm rereading this currently and coming away with mixed feelings. His prose is unmatched, but so much of the book is just turgid and frankly boring, even on a second read-through. There are passages (particular the chapters Why Windows Are Important to Me and The Curse of Colleagues) which really stand out, but a lot of it really falls flat for me.

I'm also saying this as an avid lover of Gass's work, so I'm definitely on board with it on the whole, but it's a flawed novel to be sure.

>> No.18326183

>>18325889
That was the consensus at release as well. The book was praised for prose and criticized for basically everything else. It then settled into it’s niche that it was always destined for, where it gets recommend by people who liked Gass, to people who already like Gass.

>> No.18326215

>>18326183
What’s a more digestible Gass book?
I got filtered about 2/3 of the way through The Tunnel, obviously the prose was something special but it was pretty miserable to read just because of the subject matter.

>> No.18326231

>>18326215
Omensetter’s Luck. It’s a lot easier and more traditional, not to mention shorter. The characters are interesting, the story more relatable, and his use of free indirect discourse for Jethro Furbers deteriorating mental state is brilliant.

>> No.18326866

>30 years

>> No.18326892

>>18325889
It loses its unity in some places and they sort of stick out. On the whole it was designed so you can open it to any page and enjoy yourself, so he wins there. Omensetter's Luck is better.

>> No.18326920
File: 544 KB, 387x522, Screenshot_2021-05-27 William H Gass posing as Pagliaccio · WUSTL Digital Gateway Image Collections Exhibitions.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
18326920

>>18326215
The last third of the book to turns the ship around from the Hell of the first 2/3. But I can understand putting it down, it's depressing in its unique marmoreal manner.

>> No.18327098 [DELETED] 

>>18325877
how hard is to read it as an esl? does it have purple lexicon a la Nabokov?

>> No.18327113

>>18325877
how difficult are you finding it as an esl? I'm also interested but I find it quite intimidating.

>> No.18327125

>>18327113
>>18325877
This book is insanely idiom + simile + metaphor heavy. In fact, it may be 100% this.

>> No.18327245

>>18325712
It’s amazing. THE TUNNEL was the first Gass book I ever read. I found the prose beautiful but Kohler was so ugly I had to stop at the halfway point. I had never read anything that oppressive before and I’d read stuff like Pynchon, WS Burroughs, Sade, Genet, Bataille. There was just something unrelentingly dark and painful about the narrator I couldn’t be in his head any more. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the book, though, and picked it back up a couple years later. I still found the prose amazing, but was able to finish the book. It was one of the best books I’ve ever read and I can’t wait to read it again, but it’s a daunting project. I’ve since read other Gass. He’s one of my favorite writers.

>> No.18327251

>>18326215
If you want a meditative essay that reads like a combination of a lecture/monologue and a prose poem, check out ON BEING BLUE. It’s also only about 100 pages.

>> No.18327671

Isn't this the book where talks about his penis for 10 pages?

>> No.18327684

His prose isn’t matched by anyone. It’s the greatest prose ever, not even Joyce holds a candle to it. As for the book - the book is pretty disappointing

>> No.18327806

There is no story though. If only there was a novel this well written but with an interesting story. Nabokov is too snarky for me

>> No.18328738

>>18325831
what did he mean by this

>> No.18328943

>>18325712
>making the s . o . y face at Nabokov's prose

thanks for letting me know never to read Gass

>> No.18328954

>>18326920
Wtf is that picture

>> No.18328957

>>18328943
who do you like anon?

>> No.18328967

>>18328957
Proust and Celine.

>> No.18329186

>>18328967
gass is a big proust fan, don’t write him off just yet

>> No.18329193

>>18329186
He's written off.

>> No.18329255

>>18327684
It's the most manufactured prose ever, he has his moments though.

>> No.18329262

>>18329255
>manufactured prose
people really go around saying whatever they want on here huh

>> No.18329283

>>18329262
Not him but it's true. He spent 20 years writing it and it's way too forced and MFA core. If you stay in academia too long your creativity dies.

>> No.18329293

>>18329262
It really is.
>muh alliteration in every sentence
>excessive to its own detriment
>Loses reader's interest making his books drag
He said he writes for long because he writes badly. I think he was speaking the truth. Gass' works are a result of his dedication towards polishing his sentences and since they lack an inherent naturalness to them, his books are a bore for long stretches. Joyce is the complete opposite and so are few others.

>> No.18329362

>>18329283
>MFA core
people really go around saying whatever they want on here huh
>>18329293
>inherent naturalness
people really go around saying whatever they want on here huh

>> No.18330065

>>18329362
>people really go around saying whatever they want on here huh

Yes, like Gass being good.

>> No.18330203

>>18325712
What's so impressive about Nabokov? I read Lolita and aside from the opening paragraph there wasn't a single noteworthy aspect about it. The prose was especially unremarkable.

>> No.18330268

>>18330203
>>18329262

>> No.18330394

>>18330203
redditors love it

>> No.18330548

>>18327245
>that oppressive before
Try the Lime Works by Bernhard. Maybe not as much, and definitely not as long, but that book drained the life out of me.

>> No.18330644

>>18330203
nice bait

>> No.18330800
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18330800

>>18330644

>> No.18331188
File: 2.11 MB, 1875x2775, gass-jkt_custom-e3aed9ce11dbdf723e84da37faa95ea18f07d40c.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
[ERROR]

>>18326215
Try Middle C. IMO, it's hitting on a lot of similar themes that The Tunnel explores and doesn't feel nearly as laborious to read. Just feels like a more realized novel.

>> No.18331284

>>18330644
It's not bait. I'm just completely baffled by the praise I've seen Nabokov's prose receive.

>> No.18332083

>>18331284
if the (oft-posted/memed) intro was *the only* thing that caught your attention for 300-ish pages you clearly haven’t read the book, or you’re unsusceptible to good writing. or simply baiting

>> No.18332199

>>18325712

Gass’s nominal subject is how personality and character shape the form and content of academic theorizing, as exemplified by Holocaust scholarship. Yet I suspect no one now doubts that this influence exists, and the narrator’s colleagues are rarely shown as anything other than broad, contemptible caricatures. Mocking the pretensions of academics seems like an extremely banal point to make at such length, and the sections of the book that most resemble a “campus novel” feel as if they’ve been carried forward from a different time. It doesn’t help that Gass tends to simply lean his characters against the doorframe and let them bloviate, a tendency that the academic setting enables.

These seminar room passages are among the book’s most forgettable. Moreover, it’s not clear how much Gass cares about getting the German context correct. The academic “quarrel” is meant to echo the Historikerstreit of the 1980s, but the discussions as well as the narrator’s first-person recollections make the country, people, and politics seem distant and vague. The contrast with the vivid scenes of Midwest life couldn’t be more stark, and there’s an unnerving sense that the Holocaust itself isn’t especially integral to the story Gass wants to tell about bigotry and “the fascism of the heart”.

This also helps to explain why the metafictional frame of the novel feels dissatisfying. The book is meant to be an out-of-control preface to the narrator’s actual scholarly work on German guilt and innocence. It’s also meant to show how the private obsessions and deformations of historians determine how they conceive of and write history. Yet the two books – the academic tome and the endless self-analysis – are never juxtaposed. The former is a shadow or specter, always present but unseen, and for this reason we don’t know just how the narrator’s personality shapes his scholarly prose. It would have been fascinating to read pages of the narrator’s book alongside pages of the preface-memoir, to see how passages, styles, and syntax migrate between the texts. But this would, as I’ve said, have required Gass to take the academic historical setting much more seriously than he seems willing to do, and also to think about how a historian of this particular temperament would write – this is in sharp contrast with the writing of the preface-memoir itself, which is entirely in Gass’s own voice. This is a missed opportunity, since every scholar, if they’re moderately reflective, recognizes that academic writing is allowing something of their inner self to emerge, but only up to a point. Because the two books never come together on the page, these subtleties go uninvestigated.

>> No.18332203

>>18332199

...What we get instead is Gass’s link between “fascism of the heart” – an emotional stuntedness brought on by abuse, bullying, and bigotry – and sympathy with political fascism. On the one hand, Gass’s remarks on bigotry seem eerily spot on. What else is Donald Trump, after all, but the favorite candidate of the Party of Disappointed People? On the other, it’s tough to take Kohler’s complaints of disappointment entirely seriously. He is, after all, a tenured male academic, the very epitome of privilege. His disappointments center on the general facts of human life: his middling career, his wife’s (and his own) declining body, his inattentive students, his lover’s departure. It’s hard to sustain interest in these bourgeois complaints, no matter how sincerely felt or expressively rendered. At the same time, the defining moments of Kohler’s life – his father’s casual bigotry, the trauma of his mother’s alcoholism and institutionalization – are so extreme that it’s impossible to take them as a general model.

Kohler’s indiscriminate mood of “disappointment” is the book’s fixed point, and its greatest limitation. It’s never explored or challenged; it’s just a scab to be picked at page after page. The only two emotional registers it permits are rhapsodic bitterness and amorous tenderness, and they are squeezed for every drop of sentiment. And this is why the book is kitsch. Kohler is positively gooey in describing his former lover, when he isn’t inverting the feeling and excoriating her. Even comically downplaying the Holocaust is a sour kitsch gesture – an upside-down version of what Art Spiegelman has dubbed "Holo-kitsch" – and it’s one that, like the book’s limericks about nuns and Hitler, quickly gets tiresome. It’s a way to generate easy emotion, but it plays as an already stale joke repeated more out of habit than conviction. There’s no doubt that Gass can sing, but for all its tough-minded talk, “The Tunnel” is pure schmaltz.

>> No.18332463

>>18332203
>>18332199
is this serious

>> No.18332471

>>18325712
It's designed to impress pretentious retards.

>> No.18332532

>>18332471
all good books are :-)

>> No.18333539

>>18326215
The Pedersen Kid

>> No.18333678

>>18333539
This is the only Gass that I’ve read that I would actually reread

>> No.18333699

>>18333678
I would think if you like that then you would also enjoy Omensetter's Luck unless you aren't a fan of the 100 pages of schizo rambling

>> No.18333752

>>18333699
It depends. I would probably tire out quickly after 50 pages. I can only take schizo rambling in smaller doses

>> No.18333921

>>18333752
Well the first two sections are extremely comfy

>> No.18333928

>>18332532
this one more

>> No.18334713

>>18331188
This got me to check out 12-tone music, which it turns out I really like.

>> No.18334716

>>18325831
?

>> No.18335473

>>18326183
>it gets recommend by people who liked Gass, to people who already like Gass.
Weird, in my mind Gass is the logical pick for people looking for recommendations after Faulkner.
>>18332199
>>18332203
Not a bad critique; I don't agree with all of Dan's points here but I think his proposed improvement of balancing the theoretical academic text against the story wouldn't necessarily improve it the way he assumes it would.
>>18332471
>>>/lit/
>>18326215
>>18333539
Seconding The Pedersen Kid. Some of the other ones in the short story collection that one's in are among his most "lucid" fiction so it's not bad to read it along with the collection you find it in. Avoid Willie Master's at all costs.

>> No.18336095

>>18325712
The ending of the book is one of my favourites.

His slow realisation of how fatal his bitterness is, coupled with his wife coming in and calling him out about being a bitch makes the whole depression marathon kino.

>> No.18337429

>>18332203
>What else is Donald Trump, after all, but the favorite candidate of the Party of Disappointed People?
ah, we have an intellectual in the house