/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.6068115]

What are some good but obscure novellas?

I read The Pigeon by Suskind recently and it was pretty good at 90 or so pages

[Anonymous No.6068129]

Did I hear "obscure"?

Pic related is the granddaddy of Obscurantism.

[Anonymous No.6068131]

>>6068129
Where is the joke, Buckley?

[Anonymous No.6068132]

Where did you find that? I adore Perfume, and have been looking for an English epub of The Pigeon for ages.

[Anonymous No.6068143]

>>6068129
I have no friends and so nobody will be coming to my room to see the stack of books I use as soundproofing

[Anonymous No.6068156]

[Anonymous No.6068159]

>>6068132
I bought it on Amazon like a good boy.

It reminded me of Kafka's Metamorphosis but is also very well-written. It's about a guy who has basically sought a comfortable life which allows no spontaneity or break of routine, who pretty much breaks down (metaphorically) over the course of a single day. There are like two dozen really neat sentences in it that I underlined. Worth reading IMO

[Anonymous No.6068168]

If you like Süßkind, here are some more novellas from Germany and Austria:

Zweig's Chessnovel
Hauptmann's Signalman Thiel
Mann's Death In Venice and Mario and the Wizard
Raabe's Wild Man

More modern ones:
Grass' Cat and Mouse
Bernhard's Wittgenstein's nephew
Dürrenmatt's A Dangerous Game
(you should get everything from Dürrenmatt anyway, especially: The Visit, The Judge And His Hangman, The Pledge, The Physicists, all relatively short books or plays, all great)

You should also read Ransmayr's The Last World, it's a novel but very postmodern/dream-like.

[Anonymous No.6068174]

>>6068156
Any you like in particular?

It's just that I read sometimes about certain authors who have novellas which are pretty much overlooked or ignored because of their other work, and it'd be cool to find something that someone has read and found interesting and worthwhile.

Examples might be Dostoevsky's first couple of books, or Nabokov's etc. Another one I read recently is Dangling Man, Saul Bellow's debut, which has a great opening chapter but is pretty poor overall IMO

[Anonymous No.6068179]

>>6068168
Thanks (presumably) Austro-German bro

i was just reading up on Bernhard since I read that he's pretty misanthropic or whatever and recently read how his form of misanthropy inferior to the likes of Houellebeq, who bases his skepticism re: human nature etc on theory and historical trends while Bernhard seems (the author claimed) to just hate people because he feels like doing so.

[Anonymous No.6068185]

>>6068179
>Bernhard seems (the author claimed) to just hate people because he feels like doing so.

haha yeah! Get "Woodcutting" (Holzfällen), it's a hilarious super-angry rant.

Bernhard was a satellite of the Viennese "high society" which was and is extremely fake and obsessed with status, so "Woodcutting" is based on that - it's just the inner monologue of a guy who's at a high society party, they're all waiting and gushing over a local famous actor who's supposed to show up, and the monologue is just the guy sitting on a corner hating them all. It's great!

[Anonymous No.6068194]

>>6068185
Just read the synopsis and it seems interesting. I can't imagine this type of book would get published in 2015, which is pretty sad I guess.

[Anonymous No.6068257]

>>6068194
Bernhard is the best:

>A prize is invariably only awarded by incompetent people who want to piss on your head and who do copiously piss on your head if you accept their prize.

[Anonymous No.6068283]

>>6068257
Didn't he accept a bunch of prizes? I've tried understanding the logic behind people like E.M. Cioran and Sartre etc refusing prizes but I haven't spent enough time on the subject.

[Anonymous No.6068297]

>>6068283
Yeah he even wrote a book about the many prizes he got (!!!) called "My Prizes", the above quote is from "Wittgenstein's Nephew", so it doesn't have to be his personal opinion, or maybe he just likes watersports.

[Anonymous No.6068754]

Pierre et Jean

[Anonymous No.6068786]

Liner Notes by Andy Mister has its moments. You could read it in the course of a bus ride, too.

[Anonymous No.6069035]

>>6068174
The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum is amazing. One of the choice-readings in German high schools and rightly so. Written in the 70s its themes are still shockingly up-to-date, you'd better have a tiny idea of why Böll wrote it though, regarding the political and media climate and how he himself was treated due to some of his statements, the english wikipedia article doesn't really help there, not sure how the English versions handle any of that in fore- or afterwords.

>>6068168
Seconding this, top books. If you just want a good novella by Dürrenmatt, get The Physicists, it's just around 80 pages, most of the others are book-sized if I remember right.

[Anonymous No.6069095]

>>6068168
Speaking of Austro-German literature, Daniel Kehlmann seems pretty good. I've only read his novel Beerholms Vorstellung (wiki suggests it hasn't been translated in English, unfortunately, but some others works have).

>>6068297
I remember reading of review of it, apparently it expressed the same kind of feeling as in >>6068257. Sounds good.

>>6068754
Mon négro.

>>6068115
Pretty much anything by Zweig will be somewhat obscure (judging by /lit standards of obscurity, which was your point I assume) but also seriously good. Confusion is his most famous works, but he wrote quite a handful of short stories and novellas.

[Anonymous No.6069683]

>>6068115
Toussaint's "Monsieur"
Kiyohiro Miura "He's leaving home"
Boleslav Prusz: Faraon
Most stuff from Dürrenmatt

[Anonymous No.6069686]

the invention of morel by adolfo bioy casares

[Anonymous No.6069715]

>>6069683
>Boleslav Prusz: Faraon
>Most stuff from Dürrenmatt
Are those really that obscure? At least Dürrenmatt is pretty famous.

[Anonymous No.6069747]

>>6068115
My Mother by Georges Bataille

[Anonymous No.6070500]

>>6069715
My opinion in that is very subjective of course, but I think the circle of people outside the German speaking sphere or those that aren't actually studying German having read Dürrenmatt is pretty small