/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.7246153]

Are there other readers on /lit/ who don't feel that Joyce, Faulkner, Nabokov, and Pynchon, et al, are the height of style? I find can appreciate the beauty of the prose, its sensuality, but I also find it obtrusive and expressive of an arrogance and disregard for the subject. Like a great conversationalist at a famous dinner table speaking in epigrams.

I tend to cherish much more deeply authors like Tolstoy, Chekhov, Flaubert, and George Eliot, whose prose is clear and fitting, its elegance embellishing rather than the prose itself.

[Anonymous No.7246166]

How's our friend Carson fit into all of this?

[Anonymous No.7246171]

>>7246153
>its sensuality

[Anonymous No.7246172]

Call me a pleb if you want but I read one Chekhov story (something about a lady with a white dog) and while I recognized the skill, quite frankly it bored me, and I forgot all about it not too long after I finished it.

[Anonymous No.7246176]

>>7246153
I agree with the others but Joyce? Dubliners was amazing and his prose style dialled way back

[Anonymous No.7246181]

Joyce circa Dubliners and Virginia Woolf are perfect to me. Nabokov , Faulkner and Gass feel excessive and somehow inauthentic.

[Anonymous No.7246200]

>>7246181

There are definately middle-of-the-road authors like the Joyce of Dubliners, some of Woolf, Fitzgerald, and further along, Updike, Roth and Malamud, etc. I like them all quite a bit, but they're not my favorites.

>>7246176
Joyce of Ulysses more than Dubliners, obviously.

>>7246172
That's fine. Sometimes we're not ready.

>>7246166
Carson is a descendant of these writers.

[Anonymous No.7246212]

Do you only like realism?

[Anonymous No.7246221]

>>7246212
No but I think limiting the discussion to realism will make it more productive.

[Anonymous No.7246241]

>>7246181

>Faulkner inauthentic

dropped like acid mang. . .

[Anonymous No.7246243]

>>7246153
Hi Franzen.

[Anonymous No.7246249]

>>7246243
Could also be James Wood

[Anonymous No.7246266]

>>7246243

Franzen is awful. He's a sociologist trying to tell jokes.

>>7246249
Not entirely unflattering to me.

[Anonymous No.7246271]

>>7246153
Thoughts on Hemingway and Steinbeck? His superior

[Anonymous No.7246275]

>>7246153
The later style of Borges (dry and clear) is definitely better than the former style of Borges (flowery and obtrusive).

[Anonymous No.7246281]

>>7246271
I like both writers. Steinbeck particularly. I think Hemingway's work is often missing crucial things and disguising that as compression. I didn't mention either because /lit/ has weird complexes about them.

[Anonymous No.7246286]

>>7246249
But James Wood is actually respectable.

[Anonymous No.7246297]

>>7246281
Entirely agree for Hemingway. His style conceals fundamental weaknesses, but it's concealment by omission, instead of the classic method (pile up words and words to hide the fact you've got nothing to say).

[Anonymous No.7246305]

>>7246275
I wouldn't call Borges flowery and obtrusive?

[Anonymous No.7246307]

>>7246275
Around when does the late Borges start?

[Anonymous No.7246334]

>>7246305
In Ficciones, he's got short stories who begin in a verbose manner:

>I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia. The mirror troubled the far end of a hallway in a large country house on Calle Gaona, in Ramos Mejia

Or even:

>Of the many problems on which Lonnrot's reckless perspicacity was exercised, none was so strange—so rigorously strange, one might say—as the periodic series of bloody deeds that culminated at the Villa Triste-le-Roy, amid the perpetual fragrance of the eucalyptus

That could be said more directly.

[Anonymous No.7246352]

>>7246307
Probably when he became completely blind?

Dry, simple stuff like this is more common in his later works:

>I am a woodcutter. My name doesn't matter. The hut I was born in, and where I'm soon to die, sits at the edge of the woods.

It reads better than the excerpts below IMO.

[Anonymous No.7246355]

>>7246352
>below

I mean above, of course.

[Anonymous No.7246365]

>>7246200
>Sometimes we're not ready


looooollll thx, gonna use this response whenever im butthurt abt some1's opinion of my favorite authors

[Anonymous No.7246380]

The verisimilitude of the latter authors you mentioned is very pleasing and a lot easier to read but, I've read Ulysses about 6 times and every time there's something new buried deep inside the layers of subtext. Really nothing quite like it

[Anonymous No.7246383]

I don't read much in the way of prose anymore, but I think the last great short story writer I can think of was Raymond Carver. You can kind of see how he took things like Tolstoy and Chekhov to heart, but really made it so much leaner and contemporary. The story "Cathedral" is kind of an ars poetica, because you think about this old-style glorious edifice and he tries to show you that you can get there without having to be Tolstoy or Chekhov.

He was the writer that Hemingway always wanted to be, I think.

[Anonymous No.7246385]

>>7246266
>He's a sociologist trying to tell jokes.
holy shit

[Anonymous No.7246427]

>>7246365
Another good one is "Maybe you'll understand someday, kid..."

[Anonymous No.7246443]

>>7246334
The first isnt even flowery. Does the word "conjunction" through you or something?

The second is, i agree, but it isnt hard to understand?

[Anonymous No.7246641]

>>7246153
she was such a qt

[Anonymous No.7246664]

>>7246241

This. Faulkner reads like mothafuckin butttta. Joyce goes down smooth too.

I don't much care for Pynchon or DFW tho. The latter in particular reads very poorly, imo, although I enjoyed IJ and TPK for other reasons. Nabokov is 'le thesaurus man' and feels artificial the same way DFW does. Maybe I just don't like postmodernism. Maybe it's just me.

[Anonymous No.7246731]

>>7246664
>Faulkner reads like mothafuckin butttta
I'm on Absalom Absalom at the moment and I'm deeply confused by the use of brackets, as in 'he (the demon)...' Feels kind of obtrusive and usually unnecessary since the character referred to would be obvious from context. Anyone know what's up with that?

[Anonymous No.7246825]

>>7246153
I don't think you can separate style from content like this OP. If you take Pynchon, put aside if he pulls his schtick off well or badly, then there's no point rewriting him with restraint - polyphony is intrinsic to the message and the story.

Any high modernist is the same - they're trying to use stylistic innovation to identify new territory.

Or, in your Borges example, reproducing the stories about academics and conceptual puzzles via the language of Buenos Aires personal histories would be a fucking disaster.

[Anonymous No.7246830]

>>7246153
I actually kind of like flowery ridiculously OTT prose. Martin Amis is good at it, and it works well when his narrator is an egotistical bastard probably like Amis himself

[Anonymous No.7246839]

>>7246641
That looks like a man
You might be gay fam

[Anonymous No.7246903]

>>7246153
>Faulkner
>height

kek

[Anonymous No.7246915]

>>7246153
qt wf

[Anonymous No.7246941]

>>7246830
Martin Amis is the most overrated author in Britain. Probably due to his father.

[Anonymous No.7246954]

>>7246153
100% agree with you. Chekhov is beautifully simple while Falkner uses big words for the sake of being pretentious.

[Anonymous No.7247080]

I love Joyce, Faulkner, and Pynchon

I don't like Nabokov very much though. I don't see how he fits in with the previous three either.

[Anonymous No.7247167]

>>7246941
Eh, personally I seem to see him getting a lot of hate. But I loved London Fields, Money was very good too, and other than maybe his first novel he never seems less than entertaining.

[Anonymous No.7247267]

>>7246825
I'm not saying I don't understand why these authors do what they do, I'm saying I don't find that particular means and ends to be the height of literature, and I see them being brought up again and again as if they were. It reeks to me of un-acknowledged assumptions. I'm looking for fellowship.

[Anonymous No.7247412]

>>7246153
I've read Pynchon and Nabokov out of those and I'm not a fan. Firstly I loathe almost every idea in postmodernism, philosophy and literature included. The only thing about those two which I liked was the style, but it just didn't give more than that. Pynchon is too incoherent for me and Nabokov is very empty. That said I've only read Col49 and Lolita from those, but they didn't exactly leave me wanting for more.

[Anonymous No.7247418]

>>7247412

pure gold

[Anonymous No.7247426]

>>7247418
Thanks fam I'm here every day