/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.2225874]

Now what the fuck do I read?

[Anonymous No.2225887]

little, big

[Anonymous No.2225901]

>>2225887

Just looked it up. Sounds interesting. I'll give it a look.

One review:
> One of my favorite works of modern fantasy, Little, Big, is an amazing tale told in an amazing way. Reading it I felt as if I were watching a high-wire artist: one slip and he would fall into the dreadful net of Twee. Yet Crowley never slips, not upon a single word, and the book grows more powerful with every page.

Sounds exactly like my thoughts on Peake.

[Anonymous No.2225906]

> mfw Peake's prose ruined the rest of literature for me

[Anonymous No.2225917]

>>2225906

Peake's writing kind of blows my mind a little. Gormenghast was written in the 40's, but it fucking CAREENS from perspective to perspective mid-paragraph in this very modern and cinematic way, always turning your attention exactly where it needs to be, like Peake is wielding a fucking camera.

But then he can slow down and write these page-long lurid descriptions of landscape, scenery, lighting, and weird phenomena of sound. He describes every facet of every character in this absurdly exacting detail -- and every time you're like "Fuck, Mervyn, I get it. His eyes are shiny," it ends up becoming a critically important detail that's called back to thematically throughout the rest of the book, and every time the character comes on screen.

It's so intensely visual. I wish someone would make a game out of it, so I could walk around inside.

[Anonymous No.2225925]

>>2225917
Well, Peake was an artist / painter / illustrator as much as he was a novelist, so it makes sense. The series is enormously atmospheric and visual, you';re definitely right there

[Anonymous No.2225945]

>>2225925

He has a good handle on sense of time too. He'll have somebody open a door and see something shocking, and suddenly everything cranks into slow-mo, and the prose gets hyper-detailed. And every time he pulls away from individual characters and drops into the present tense to just let the camera free-float around Gormenghast in realtime, it's fucking breathtaking.

[Anonymous No.2225974]

And the days move on and the names of the months change and the four seasons bury one another and it is spring again and yet again, and the small streams that run over the rough sides of Gormenghast Mountain are big with rain while the days lengthen and summer sprawls across the countryside, sprawls in all the swathes of its green, with its gold and sticky head, with its slumber and the drone of doves and with its butterflies and its lizards and its sunflowers, over and over again, its doves, its butterflies, its lizards, its sunflowers, each one an echo-child while the fruit ripens, and the grotesque boles of the ancient apple trees are dappled in the low rays of the sun and the air smells of such rotten sweetness as brings hunger to the breast, and makes of the heart a sea-bed, and a tear, the fruit of salt and water, ripens, fed by a summer sorrow, ripens and falls . . . falls gradually along the cheek-bones, wanders of the wastelands listlessly, the loveliest emblem of the heart's condition.

[Anonymous No.2225975]

>>2225974

And the days move on and the names of the months change and the four seasons bury one another and the field-mice draw upon their granaries. The air is murky and the sun is like a raw wound in the grimy flesh of a beggar, and the rags of the clouds are clotted. The sky has been stabbed and has been left to die above the world, filthy, vast and bloody. And then the great winds come and the sky is blown naked, and a wild bird screams across the glittering land. And the Countess of Groan stands at the window of her room with the white cats all at her feet, and stares at the frozen landscape spread below her. A year later she is standing there again, but the cats are abroad in the valleys and a raven sits heavy upon her should.

And every day the myriad happenings. A loosened stone falls from a high tower. A fly drops lifeless from a broken pane. A sparrow twitters in a cave of ivy.

The days wear out the months and the months wear out the years, and a flux of moments, like an unquiet tide, eats at the black coast of futurity.

And Titus Groan is wading through his boyhood.

I came.