Authors you will never read

Funnily enough I'd even say the same about Zadie Smith. Some good non-fiction, some really bad - enough to put you off her, from a distance.

But the work - On Beauty, NW - can be really serious and ambitious and impressive; it maybe renders the badness of the essays irrelevant. A 'trust the tale not the teller' factor.

... All of this seems a good reason for the occasionally noted strategy of a writer being a recluse and not putting their 'personality' out there at all; just letting any sense of it arise from the fiction.

And is Harry Potter a 'posh child'? I always thought his name was partly an attempt to make the 'wizard school' premise more egalitarian

Such nuances are lost on yours truly, a foreigner.

I very much enjoy A Wizard of Earthsea, by the way. If memory serves, Ged's passage through wizard school is quite brief and very few details are provided about its 'culture'. Le Guin depicts the experience in a more muted and archetypal light, which I prefer.

"Also for real saying you're never going to read JK Rowling or even someone like Ian McEwan is like ostentatiously stating that you've never heard a Coldplay record.

― Matt DC"

statements which probably mean different things in the us than they do in the uk

i still for some reason have never managed the ability to consistently differentiate ian mcewan and iain m. banks

i tried reading banks but i didn't much like his writing style

i've never _knowingly_ heard a coldplay record

"I will probably read Infinite Jest at some point

― flamboyant goon tie included"

fwiw my personal recommendation is not to bother. self-loathing brilliant white guy, you know, i think we've probably had enough exposure to the type. he does a wonderful job of aping insight without ever reaching any actionable conclusions to his self-destructive ruminating... except, i suppose, for one.

Murakami: I'm a fan of the hyper-politicized post-war Japanese lit theatre (Oe, Mishima), and found Murakami's apoliticism unappealing, kind of a Superflat-esque shruglit. That said, I adore David Mitchell's homages to Murakami
Franzen: felt defensive at all times
Bolano: I guess I liked The Savage Detectives but 2666 just left me wanting to stop reading fake-Flaubert and re-read real-Flaubert
Pynchon: idk I just don't like it

Endo was recommended to me over a decade ago, I read "Silence", I hated it, but I still wanna watch the movie adaptation for whatever reason

I'm still gonna read Infinite Jest
And Coldplay rules what are you guys talking about

What is great about Earthsea imo is how "Wizard" is told-slant male-protagonist fantasy fiction but the series shifts tone and focus along with Le Guin's increasing radicalization over the years

Harry Potter is a public schoolboy who lives off a trust fund and is popular because he's good at sport, he marries his high school sweetheart and becomes a cop after dropping out of sixth form.

fwiw my personal recommendation is not to bother. self-loathing brilliant white guy, you know, i think we've probably had enough exposure to the type. he does a wonderful job of aping insight without ever reaching any actionable conclusions to his self-destructive ruminating... except, i suppose, for one.

― Kate (rushomancy), Thursday, 6 August 2020 14:32 (ten minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

the absolute fuck is this post

xps to gyac: your dad is a wise man.

This is going to sound ridiculous, but the fact that a boarding school is called an 'internat' in Romanian (and French) is quite ominous, since it can also function as an adjective (not in French, however) meaning 'hospitalized' (e.g. committed to a psychiatric ward) or simply 'locked up'. I also get the sense that it's a far more common 'educational' arrangement in Britain/ex-British colonies/Commonwealth countries.

...any one who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison. It is the people brought up in the gay intimacy of the slums, Paul learned, who find prison so soul destroying.

Heh, I've been meaning to read that one!

Is Murakami apolitical? I haven’t read all his stuff but Wind-Up Bird did definitely write about the Japanese in Manchuria and it didn’t come across as neutral to me. You have to take that in the context of Japanese politicians seeming to constantly play down their history too.

Murakami wrote that book on the Tokyo gas attack. But that was a few years after I read a bunch, enjoyed it ok then stopped.

But if you are coming at him from Mishima and Oe it would be disappointing.

Oh yeah of course, he goes a bit further in his interviews.

fwiw my personal recommendation is not to bother. self-loathing brilliant white guy, you know, i think we've probably had enough exposure to the type. he does a wonderful job of aping insight without ever reaching any actionable conclusions to his self-destructive ruminating... except, i suppose, for one.

― Kate (rushomancy), Thursday, 6 August 2020 14:32 (ten minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

the absolute fuck is this post

― imago, Thursday, 6 August 2020 bookmarkflaglink

A reason to drop DFW was that piece on Federer which is a bit of a horror show. He is the one for the tried it in a lit mag corner.

But I also think the trend for dropping people for being white and male and middle class is good and funny work, and I'm here for it.

I have never read a Murakami novel, despite trying. Gotten about twenty pages in to a few of them and tossed them aside. Don't get the hype— writing seems flat?

Tbh, I've never read a lot of the supposed "greats" of literary fiction in English and don't plan on it. I find too much of it excruciatingly boring, as if many writers are writing novels the way they think they should be written instead of how they want to write them.

(I am speaking, of course, about mostly 20th century greats like Roth, Rushdie, etc)

my issue was with the 'actionable conclusions' and flippant suicide banter tbh

my experience of Murakami is that he has two English translators and I love the one and find the other dull and lacking in character

Yeah, I think I might have had bad luck! But oh well. There are too many books in this world that I am excited to read, and Murakami's don't make the list lol.

Re: DFW, I admire his non-fiction writing, tbh. Loved this essay when it first came out, have no idea whether it holds up: https://genius.com/David-foster-wallace-tense-present-democracy-english-and-the-wars-over-usage-annotated

Re: Stephen King— he's actually quite a good writer. The Shining in particular is an excellent book about alcoholism and cultures of misogyny...I often teach a story of his that was in the New Yorker about 20 years ago, "All That You Love Will Be Carried Away." It remains one of my favorite short stories of the past quarter century, at least.

Coldplay >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> J.K. Rowling

my issue was with the 'actionable conclusions' and flippant suicide banter tbh

― imago, Thursday, 6 August 2020 bookmarkflaglink

Disensitised to suicide banter ever since Hofmann laughed at Zweig's suicide note.

I find too much of it excruciatingly boring, as if many writers are writing novels the way they think they should be written instead of how they want to write them.

This is a fairly common gripe when you tend to favour poetry (or 'the poetic') over teleological narrative structures (we're in the same camp).

Which is perhaps why I'm really obsessed with Brossard right now— never have I read novels that read so much like poetry.

Hofmann on zweig is v good and the sort of thing that if I hadn’t already read some zweig might make him an author I will never read

So yes, agreed.

my issue was with the 'actionable conclusions' and flippant suicide banter tbh

― imago

fwiw "flippancy" wasn't the angle i was coming at it from

my engagement with the works of dfw is an important and deeply personal part of who i am

my post probably didn't make that apparent

But I also think the trend for dropping people for being white and male and middle class is good and funny work, and I'm here for it.

― xyzzzz__

i also don't recommend against dfw on the grounds that he is "white and male and middle class". the parts of his identity that were so destructive, to himself and to others, are not, i would argue, _intrinsic_ to the white, male, middle-class experience. i think it is important to disentangle the abuse paradigm, which was a paradigm that was, uh, _deeply embedded_ in dfw, from cis white maleness is valuable work and work that is worth doing; since those flaws are so abundant in dfw's work, he makes a good vehicle for the interrogation of that paradigm.

xps to table

A paradigmatic moment for me is when the narrator of Samuel Beckett's Malone Dies begins spinning the yarn of a man named Saposcat (etymologically: know-shit, or some such), presumably to alleviate his own boredom, by way of a thinly veiled parody of the 19th century realist novel. As one sentence pointlessly follows the other, it is repeatedly interrupted by the selfsame burst of self-commentary: 'What tedium'.

ty for clarifying rusho

Probably won't read this guy: https://newrepublic.com/article/158761/learned-worst-novelist-english-language

Ya thanks for the clarification, rushomancy. I was gonna post "well, I'm not gonna touch that!" but instead I actually decided not to touch that

I get what you're saying, extremely. This is why I don't fuck with Franzen (or Roth, and Coetzee is kind of a long shot) I think there is a particular position of defensiveness with these guys that doesn't really wash with me. Not that I don't adore the work of many many old white guys, just not this particular approach and I don't really have the faculties to actually nail down why

Or the reviewer (any relation to whiney?).

xp

Which is perhaps why I'm really obsessed with Brossard right now— never have I read novels that read so much like poetry.

― blue light or electric light (the table is the table)

I don't know if you've been discussing this elsewhere, but this intrigued me... do you mean Nicole Brossard (I'm guessing so but there are other authors with the surname)? Just skimming some descriptions of her work and it sounds quite up my street.

Yep, can confirm on table's behalf.

Re: old white dudes, I read Berryman's The Dream Songs and felt irritated but couldn't say why and then followed that up with an Anne Carson book ("Plainwater") that began with some translations of Mimnermos and there was one poem in there that made me go "ah see this is where Berryman should've aimed hisself toward and didn't":

A Sudden Unspeakable Sweat Floweth Down My Skin

He gazed, perhaps he blames.

Sweat. It's just sweat. But I do like to look at them.
Youth is a dream where I go every night
and wake with just this little jumping bunch of artieries
in my hand.
Hard, darling, to be sent behind their borders.
Carrying a stone in each eye

Quoting Plainwater is kinda cheating though. Nothing she's written since has left as much of a mark on me.

Is it completely invented? I've never been sure, I'm not a classics person so I never actually figured out (aside from looking at wikipedia to confirm the existence of her sources) if Carson just wrote that Mimnermos/Stesichorus shit herself or if it was actually translated from classical fragments

And come on her Sappho translations are god-like and every faggot loves Red

Carson's best book of literary work is "Short Talks." Nothing else matches it.

emil.y, I'd highly recommend Brossard. 'Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon' and 'Mauve Desert' are exquisite, and the deeper one goes the more weird and experimental she becomes.

Well worth reading trans poet and classics scholar Kay Gabriel on Carson: https://tripwirejournal.files.wordpress.com/2018/06/tw14gabrieloncarson.pdf

Thank you, table and pom. Definitely going on my list.

Also cool that a thread about authors you will never read has given me a new author to read!

Re: Carson, yeah, those Sappho translations are top-notch. I'll have to revisit Short Talks – I read it 15 years ago… As for Red, I distinctly got the feeling that it was Not for Me, but that's just my short-sightedness talking.

I loved Red as an undergrad. Re-read it a few years ago and was not very enthused.

But I also think the trend for dropping people for being white and male and middle class is good and funny work, and I'm here for it.

― xyzzzz__

i also don't recommend against dfw on the grounds that he is "white and male and middle class".

---

Part of the premise behind the thread is to make a sorta informed guess. Been around the block, the nose is pretty good etc. So I'm making a short cut and if I see a white and he's acting and talking a certain way I might dismiss it as that and move on. That's just how it's gonna go. It's about knowing when to think on and when not.

even if you are the most widely-read person in the world, there will be many, many more authors you haven't read and never will than those you have.

perhaps we could ask James Morrison to verify this for us since he qualifies in that category.

Whenever I see James Morrison's name I start singing