Authors you will never read

Merchant Ivory is good not bad

chairman alph is cancelled serves imperialism

― mark s, Monday, 10 August 2020 bookmarkflaglink

My cover of Wings of a Dove has a still from the Merchant Ivory film and the middle of the book is a few pages worth of stills from this I will never log off!

Sad! The William Gaddis reissues are bringing out that Franzen essay on him. Someone whom I loathe on twitter was praising that one the other week!

Do people read Moby Dick? I read it a couple times and it's in my "yes, my friends, you must read it" list but it seems avoided for reasons

The size of it probably most obvious reason? I enjoyed Moby Dick a lot but will probably not read it again.

Incidentally a far more demanding read than the Recherche ime.

Wholly agreed.

xpost

Neither film version of The Wings of the Dove is by Merchant-Ivory!

MD is great and Melville is generally loved here I reckon (in the last few years I have been good at filling in the gaps genrally: Stendhal, Dostoevsky, Cervantes)

Lol I assumed it was!! xp

I didn't find Moby Dick intimidating-- aside from its length, and adjusting to the fact that the reader will be deprived of narrative for long stretches, and accepting the fact that every other chapter is a NatGeo article. Confidence-Man was far tougher-- but I found it really rewarding to read twice back-to-back. The first time, I pored over the Dalkey edition footnotes, the second-time I skimmed through a footnote-free version online. Very very rewarding!

I've never gotten further than Swann's Way, I read the Enright and then the Davis. Proust doesn't appeal so much to me, dunno why

He's massively self-indulgent, massively verbose and not very interesting.

moby-dick (call it by its name) isn't remotely difficult to read and is good and funny and interesting, I will never stop reading it

"every other chapter is a NatGeo article" —— lol really really important in a novel written from the perspective of an early mid-C19 whaler to erase the perspective and understanding and knowledge and if you will hard-won science of the mid-C19 whaler, just get rid!

moby-dick (call it by its name) isn't remotely difficult to read

If that's not bragging then I don't know what is.

I will never not brag

I have never heard anyone say anything bad about MOBY-DICK.

It is the one book that literally everyone, always, talks about with unlimited enthusiasm and reverence.

many books and authors mentioned up-thread I do in fact find difficult to read (gemini)

the brag there is being a gemini (praiseworthy)

He's massively self-indulgent, massively verbose and not very interesting.

― the pinefox, Monday, August 10, 2020 2:33 PM (four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Yes, yes, and rong, respectively

Proust is lovely

I generally refrain from judging writers noted for their style (or poets, for that matter) when I have no choice but to read them in translation. See also: Pushkin.

xp Hard to deny that he's self-indulgent, but to me that translates into an incredible generosity towards the reader.

I didn't find Moby-Dick challenging except for the aforementioned reasons. It is jarring and wonderful to have that protracted final chapter arrive, makes you feel that you've been becalmed for 500 pages and suddenly sucked into a narrative maelstrom

I haven't read much Proust, but what I read of Swann's Way was impressive (and not at all difficult) and convinced me to properly undertake his full undertaking when I feel sure that I can go the distance.

New and recently-discovered candidate for this thread: Jessica Beck, author of a series of fifty donut-based murder mysteries.

I was pleasantly surprised after first reading Moby-Dick a few years ago to see all the enthusiasm on the thread here on ilx. It's really fantastic. Totally surprised me, was a lot stranger and more interesting than I anticipated.

Proust is my favourite of capital M modernist people by some distance, apart from Musil and Borges, although I want to read more Faulkner and I think Woolf's Diary will be a lot of fun (got a vol of it last week), otherwise I am done with her fiction.

It is the one book that literally everyone, always, talks about with unlimited enthusiasm and reverence.

― the pinefox, Monday, 10 August 2020 bookmarkflaglink

Lol ok but many people have said MD is a book about whales and can be very unenthusiastic about it. I read The Confidence Man first because of this xp - then yes ppl on here for me to read it over xmas a couple of years ago I think.

Agree re: merchant ivory at least to the extent that they often undermined the very thing they were most often accused of being (reactionary, conservative figureheads for an English postcard culture industry) and their post-Curtis successors are such comparative Philistines it's easy to be nostalgic.

Who is unenthusiastic about MOBY-DICK?

No-one that I have ever read or encountered who has read it.

Sure I have seen this unenthusiasm for it on ilx or maybe The Guardian

Another Moby-Dick fan here. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

i bought it two weeks ago and it's sitting about 4 books back in my list.

Jessica Beck, author of a series of fifty donut-based murder mysteries.

Wow, culinary mysteries are a whole subgenre, huh

Plax (ico), mentioning philistines, makes a good point: Merchant-Ivory films were (are) criticized for being 'literary' among other things - but our society is not very literary; doing anything literary in it can be a struggle; M-I were actually, definition, more intelligent, well-read and thoughtful than much of what else was going on.

not the thread for it really, but M-I were not in fact more intelligent, well-read and thoughtful: they were generally incompetent film-makers (meaning incompetent AS film-makers) who also generally hadn't adequately read the books they were recreating

you can make the argument I guess that this double-flaw did double-distance them from the kind of glozed fetish that the "literary film" is assumed to entail

(lol the word "fetish" twice autocorrected to the word "Keith") (I note again that this laptop is BORROWED)

M-D is the only library book I never returned, opting instead to just pay the library for the copy. It was the Norton Annotated, and boy was that worth it.

(I should note— I'd moved out of state, and it had become a treasured tome by the time I realized it wasn't my book! Big yucks at tabes in his early 20s)

We just move in very different circles then, pinefox.

michael "iggy" ignatieff and roger "scrotum" scruton punished (I think) debut novels

I don't think this autocorrect was adequately appreciated.

borrowed laptop just calling balls and strikes here (sometimes very correctly)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcY7AkN1X8Q

^^^the only good novel (film version)

I find it a bit scary when seasoned readers still get intimidated by huge books because I'd like to think the intimidation goes away eventually.

Looked at the M-I filmography earlier and haven't seen enough either way to know their worth. I do like Christopher Reeve in The Bostonians, the suicide bantz in Le Divorce is bizarre given who it's coming from. They do bring a bunch of authors like Ishiguro and Forster to the screen, both of whom I doubt I'll read (maybe Maurice aside, wonder if M-I treat it well or not).

Coming back to Matt's point earlier it's true that mostly anglo, white and male is a thing that is coming out as avoidance but actually the British comic novel is something I've gotten into in the last couple of years. Early Anthony Powell and Evelyn Waugh, and a couple of Kingsley Amis novels too. Interested in this old Tory novelist and I may yet read Dance to the music of Time in time for no deal Brexit.

XP I need at least 500 pages to get me going I do.

you must not, in every case at least, take the higgledy-piggledy whale statements, however authentic, in these extracts, for veritable gospel cetology.

— Moby Dick (@MobyDickatSea) August 10, 2020

mark s otm about M-I as filmmakers, though it's worth noting that almost all their screenplays were written by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who must take at least some of the blame for not "adequately reading the books they were recreating".

moby-dick (call it by its name) isn't remotely difficult to read and is good and funny and interesting, I will never stop reading it

― mark s, Monday, August 10, 2020 2:35 PM (six hours ago)

boring pedantic note: the hyphen in the title was probably a mistake on the publisher's part, given that "moby dick" is not hyphenated in the text

Wow.

M-I made THE REMAINS OF THE DAY.

I am certain that someone involved in making this film had read the novel.

counterpedantry that's also a brag: when I was sub editor at sight and sound I was fact-checking an iain sinclair piece and asked him abt moby-dick vs moby dick and he said "it's what it says on the title page so that's the title" and this is also my position now and the correct one imo

Mark, you told this story on here in about 2001.

Though I have always, perhaps falsely, remembered it as Sinclair saying 'If it was good enough for Melville, it'll do for me'.

he's fun to sub btw because he's always right... "Iain do you want Moby-Dick with a dash it?" "That's how Melville spelled it" "ooer k-blimey-o" etc

― mark s, Thursday, 21 March 2002 01:00 (eighteen years ago) link

evolution of an anecdote

Who needs unreliable narrators when we can do it ourselves.