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/lit/ - Literature

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3329051 No.3329051 [Reply] [Original]

Neil Gaiman is today's master of flashy but meaningless wordplay. It's in how he talks as well as how he writes.

He's successful because his style plays off the impulses of unintelligent readers who can tell when something sounds deep, but are incapable of understanding the true meaning of written passages that actually mean something.

Except Sandman, that shit's dope

>> No.3329060

>>>/co/

>> No.3329066

>>3329051
Yes, all of that plus he ponces off of the best of prior fantasy writers - and relies on the probability that most of his target audience has never read anything by Lord Dunsany.

>> No.3329076
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3329076

neil gaiman looks exactly like jeanette winterson

>> No.3329077

>>3329066
I haven't read Lord Dunsany (I don't know anyone who's read him, nobody's fucking read him) and I still think Gaiman's a pretentious knob. However he's got great taste and is good at making sentences so he gets away with it.

>> No.3329079

I think Gaiman's a talented story teller who writes work with much more substance than most of his contemporaries.


He's not great literature, but that's not what he's trying to be. He's good for what he is.

>> No.3329087

>>3329079
I think he's got very little substance. The points he makes are extremely simple yet he masks it behind a mysterious suspenseful style to make it look more complicated than it actually is.

>> No.3329098

>>3329087
I can see where you're coming from.
I think it depends on to whom you're comparing him.

Gaiman to Nabokov?
Gaiman's a puddle to Nabokov's ocean.

Gaiman to Martel?
American Gods > Life of Pi

>> No.3329102

>>3329098
Gaiman to Pratchett. I'm reading Good Omens. He implies plot points for the sake of implying them so simple shit looks mysterious, not because it actually adds to the story.

>> No.3329109

>>3329102
What does it mean to imply plot points?

>> No.3329122

>>3329109
70% of the content of American Gods is about introducing characters who are hidden gods, yet never actually stating it and instead just dropping clues for you to figure out yourself who the gods are. It's fun, and much more entertaining than just saying "And then he met Calypso the next day in the McDonalds", but it's meaningless at the end of the day.

>> No.3329126

Jewish writers in both fiction and non-fiction tend to be like that

Derrida and Marcuse

>> No.3329128

>>3329122
Ah, right. I didn't understand at first, but you just described what I liked about one book and disliked about the other.

>> No.3329134

>>3329051
Yeah, I never liked his novels all that much... but Sandman is the best comic ever written and, in fantasy, third only to Tolkien's work and The Book of the New Sun for me.