/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.9634713]

Your favourite novel never discussed on lit? Bonus points if it's written by someone who isn't American or British.

[Anonymous No.9634733]

>>9634713

>Bonus points if you act like an identity politics fuckwit about it.

Fixed.

[Anonymous No.9634750]

>>9634713
There used to be a hardcore MM,MD poster here that would never shut up about it. he put it on the map for me
>>9634733
You're out of your mind if you think Gaddis isn't a meme here

[Anonymous No.9634768]

>>9634733

OP here, I've read all four of Gaddis' novels. A Frolic of his Own actually heavily influenced me and now I'm in law school. I've realised that I've spent the last few years reading way too many American and British authors and I want to branch out and explore other cultures and writers. I don't really believe in the merits of identity politics. My country is far too fatalist for that sort of thing.

Did you post a picture of Gaddis because you've never read a writer who isn't American?

[Anonymous No.9634773]

[Anonymous No.9634778]

>>9634768
>$375 on Amazon

fuck

[Anonymous No.9634882]

>>9634768

>Did you post a picture of Gaddis because you've never read a writer who isn't American?

Whew. Hot line.

Ya got me, killer.

[Anonymous No.9634926]

Dutch meme.

[Anonymous No.9635098]

bump

[Anonymous No.9635266]

Pedro Paramo and Quixote

[Anonymous No.9636650]

Come on guys, this could be a good thread!

[Anonymous No.9636669]

The Poor by Brandão
Equal to the best french symbolist novel and has a very unique style in its own right. Portugese from the turn of the century.

[Anonymous No.9636676]

http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/book-review/the-impossible-fairy-tale-by-han-yujoo

Dark adult fairy tale

[Anonymous No.9636705]

I don't think anyone here has read it, unfortunately.

[Anonymous No.9636712]

[Anonymous No.9636717]

>>9634713
Easily one of my favorite books of all time, i don't think i ever met anyone who read it to the end.

>>9636705
I've been meaning to read it since forever.

[Anonymous No.9636728]

[Anonymous No.9636746]

[Anonymous No.9636780]

>>9634713
Ironweed.

[Anonymous No.9636859]

I wish more people would read this. It's dense, but has some of the best writing I've read in a long time.

[Anonymous No.9637177]

>>9634713
>>9634750
I can't say with certainty that I'm that aforementioned poster but I have shilled Miss Mac before.

Brilliant book with some of the most intense and and purposeful language in any book I've ever read. Young is really good at conveying (and more than that maintaining) this incredible sense of space and dream. Young's poetry is also quite nice and there's probably more criticism about it than her novel.

if anyone has questions about miss mac shoot.

[Anonymous No.9637287]

>>9634773
This one seems pretty great. Never had heard of it. Thanks to whoever post it.

[Anonymous No.9637391]

>>9637177
talk more about the novel .why should i read it?

[Anonymous No.9637457]

Possibly one of the most extreme and original postmodern novels out there.

[Anonymous No.9637462]

>>9637457
what is it about?

[Anonymous No.9637485]

Infinite Jest, probably

[Anonymous No.9637604]

>>9637462
It's about a small group of guys who travel around Italy and Europe during the early 70s. All of them are gay and born to upper middle-class families of Rome and Milan. They constantly, ceaselessly talk about literature and philosophy, so much that the plot takes second place and you easily forget about what they're doing and where they're going. Even in the highlights, for example when they're about to have an orgy, to meet someone important, to engage in some petronian adventure, they can't help but talking about their favorite authors. What's funny is they do it with lots of irony, sourness, and especially nibleness, resembling an earliest form of /lit/, but in real life. They do travel all the time (with their parents money), but the cities they see are nothing more than a beautiful background, so it doesn't really fit the category of travel literature. I had some hard time reading it, due to the staggering amount of names and titles dropped in every speech, most of which I didn't know anything about. You can easily get to have 30 names of different authors in a single page. And it's not a blunt ostentation of the author's knowledge, but an ongoing eruption of great ideas, connections, intuitions, projects. That novel is an unbridled flow of energy along 1370 pages. Arbasino wrote it when he was 33 years old, he must have been so fucking well-read he put me to shame.

[Anonymous No.9637674]

>>9637604
That sounds like torture to read imo.

[Anonymous No.9637753]

>>9637674
I'm aware it may sound like torture, but I enjoyed it a lot. There's a sort of carefree, summery, youthful atmosphere underlying the whole book, which I found very refreshing. It's also a great document of an entire era, the postwar years of the economic boom, possibly the last real renaissance of Italy (but we can say the same for most of Europe).

[Anonymous No.9638527]

>>9637753
It hasn't been translated into English has it?

[Anonymous No.9638537]

>>9637391
sure, let me see if i can pull up my post from before :

At the center of most of it is the protag's mother, the "opium lady" who sits in her giant house by the sea hallucinating (possibly willingly) on copious amounts of opium. Lots of what's really real/what isn't even from the very beginning of the book. the famous quote being :

>What shall we do when, fleeing from illusion, we are confronted by illusion?

Also apparantly opium lady is based on a real person Young knew, here we go:

No. All this was in my background before I ever arrived. Her house was just right for a young poet. There couldn't have been a better place. I was offered opium every evening. But I always said, “No, thanks,” and for that reason, she used to call me the “prosaic sprite,” because I didn't need drugs to dream. I stayed with her most of the time. I was offered the bed in which Edna St. Vincent Millay had slept, when she was a visitor in Chicago, and the idea of sleeping in Millay's bed—it would mean nothing to me now, but at that age . . . it seemed to be the most marvelous thing that could ever happen to any young person. On the opium lady's bedside was a silver drinking cup which had belonged to John Keats, a little mosaic Persian letter set, and a beautiful bird with a sea shell. I have these things at my bedside now. Her daughter gave them to me when she died.

what it's "about" is the character of Miss Mac, who's kind of an antithesis to opium lady, along with these twin brothers, one of which is dead, and a suffragette. These are essentially the only characters, and they both get hundreds of pages just for them to (in the case of Spitzer quite literally) wander through

[Anonymous No.9638545]

>>9638537
realizing now how full of typos that is, in the "no, all this...." till the end of the paragraph is an excerpt from one of Young's interviews (i'm fairly sure it's just the PR one)

[Anonymous No.9638674]

>>9636728
Is that Blooms hat?

[Anonymous No.9638689]

Petersburg is discussed every so often, but not that much. Learning Russian to understand a lot of the word play in the original language.

[Anonymous No.9639233]

>>9638527
Unfortunately it hasn't, probably because of the lenght

[Anonymous No.9639263]

>>9634926
Came here to post this. Love it.

[Anonymous No.9639338]

>>9634713
Thirteen Cents K. Sello Duikier
Black Sunlight -Dambudzo Marechera
Reflex & Bone Structure-Clarence Major
Dem - William Melvin Kelley
The Wig- Charles Wright
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts - Amos Tutolua
The Sellout- Paul Beatty
Boy With Thorn -Ricky Laurentis
How to Be Drawn -Terrance Hayes
The Farm - Clarence Cooper Jr.
Yesterday Will Make You Cry - Chester Himes