While I have great respect for him and remember enjoying 100 when I read it 20 years ago, my stumbling block with GGM is I'm never sure what the stories are "really" about, and it seems a close connection to the culture is required. My own fault, I know.

i know what you mean. american culture tends to be pretty insular, as are most of the dominant cultures in the world-- self-contained, self-producing and self-consuming. that's not your fault though.

the thing about being from latin america is that you know you're not the center of the world (the center of the world is in fact building a wall to keep you out), and you know that you nature is a mongrel nature (or maybe you try to ignore it but you can't escape it), and therefore you tend to embrace everything that comes handy-- from chinese poetry to german philosophy to santería to japanese anime to american fast food (but better seasoned, lol).

i think most colonized cultures tend to be this way-- always ready to steal and copy and mix new things. maybe this is why hiphop (i'm not a hiphop expert) is better at melding sounds than 100 years of dull cuntry music.

--

this is also why poe blew away the french btw

Like Andrei Platonov, or somebody of that sort.

thanks for making me google!



(that photo reminded me of this one)

tell us more? (something we can't find on wikipedia)

okay, i got the comparison

garcia marquez is like the latin american mark twain-- or walt whitman

you know how you go through the literary history of the united states and you say "yeah whatever" (save poe, who was from another planet) and suddenly there appears mark twain and it really is something that couldn't come from any other place and you say--this-- this is american literature?

like that.

but maybe it was melville who did it before him. i just haven't read him ha ha ha ha.

i should! uff. i should.

but no, see, twain.

Melville wrote about the BIG topics of life. Twain wrote about the experience of life. Two different masters.

Melville (Moby Dick) is my favorite novel, because it explores every aspect of life not explored in the other novels of the era (I hate those comedy of manners bullshit novels).

Twain was more like a distilled America, a funny one willing to look at itself critically and seeing the ugliness and beauty in the every day. Twain was a profoundly ANGRY man whose work covers that up with humor and ridicule. He ruled. He told royalty to go fuck off. he told the church to go fuck off. he told the government to go fuck off. he told people to their face to go fuck off.

Marquez is loved by my mom for that same reason you state !@#$%^. She sees him as the master that showed the world that Latin America had magic to share, as equally good as any of the european masters.

if the "best" is determined by the most widely disseminated, easiest to translate and still carry forward the writer's message and ideas, then I think Vonnegut and his spare prose could be considered among the greatest of 20th century.

If "best" means the best use of the English language, then Joyce would have to be right up there as the best. He created as much language as Shakespeare

It is hard to determine such a thing.

yeah which is why i'm asking for people's reasonings rather than declarations

"best" is going to be always subjective. but it's the reasoning (and the intersubjectivity) i'm interested in. not exactly asking for a sales pitch. rather... just to see perspectives.

i think demonyo was concise but very precise in his appreciations-- and putting both gatsby and the trial in the same "social insight" category was like gracián's agudeza-- bringing two dissimilar things under the same concept. brilliant really.

speaking of vonnegut, and social insight also, one of the speeches in mother night (or was it a letter? i forget) really blew my mind with its sharp understanding of the american mind.

it's the one that compares the behavior of british and american prisoners in the german camps. do you know the one i'm talking about?

Mother Night is one of my faves. I think it is a very spot on example of that human problem that vonnegut describes as "we are what we pretend to be, so be careful what you pretend to be."

Much of human suffering comes from not understanding this simple statement.

from Mother Night

"There are plenty of good reasons for fighting, but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too."

Vonnegut is just barely above Stephen King. No need for toilet paper when books by either of those 2 around.

shit, son. Vonnegut describes the inherent despair and disillusion and pain of living in this ridiculous synthetic world we have created for ourselves with humor and cynicism, and deep honesty.

Stephen King writes straight salami. great salami, but he admits it is salami.

'Give the devil his due' but 99% of the language Joyce created has no significant life outside of his own writing, with almost none becoming 'household words', whereas Shakespeare ... well you see what I did there.

I bet if you had checked around 80 years after Shakepear that his "new language" took just as long to infiltrate the English world.

Well considering the pace at which things moved then, the extent of his influence on Samuel Johnson's English Dictionary, released a century after Shakespeare's death, means he probably had a greater impact than Joyce is ever likely to. Besides, wasn't it Joyce himself who said that, "After God, Shakespeare created most"?

you're a cruel man

yes but do you have that speech? the one about the americans acting like animals in the prison camp? i've been looking like that forever (i don't own the book)

Raymond Chandler probably deserves a mention, too, both as a literary stylist and for creating one of the most enduring and influential visions of early 20th Century urban America.

well, we're certainly on the downhill slope now. Vonnegut always struck me as high school intellectualism.
Robbe-Grillet created a couple of the most ominous and unsettling stories ever in the Voyeur and Jealousy.

I think you nailed it with Twain.

Fucking grim. It's the account of a guy who spent years in a Russian gulag back in the 40's. Reading it the question always pops up for me of "how are humans able to carry on no matter how grim the outlook?". Knowing that whilst you might have a ten year sentence often the prisoner would be told at the end of it "we're adding another ten years, and there's nothing you can do". Where do people find the energy to carry on? It reminds me of that line in Samuel Beckett's story 'The Unnamable' "you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.".

There have been more famous boks about guags released "One day in the life..." etc. but why this one isn't more well know I'll never know.

About Platonov, I can only recommend reading The Foundation Pit. Even though a little knowledge of the Bolshevik revolution and Stalinism is needed to fully appreciate his genius, it is still worth a read.
His fiction is often portrayed as some sort of proto-dissident criticism of Stalinism, but it's far from such a simplistic reduction, nor is it absurdism, as some like to claim. He's quite the realist as I see it, although precisely, because his fiction is set in a world between the crumbling old and the new, yet to come, truly communist word, the reality of such a intermediary position cannot but appear as quite absurd. He writes about a world where old notions no longer hold people, yet new ideas fail to give a meaningful existence, and where these strange "no longer" and "not yet" worlds mix. Furthermore, it sheds light on the early trans-human and bio-political utopias of the late 19th/early 20th century Russia, like Cosmism for example.

Besides, what is truly shocking about his writing is that he himself was a true supporter of the soviets: travelling around the country, helping people to establish councils. So all of the horror he's writing about acquires an extra tragic dimension.

Bolshevik existentialism if you will, but actually it is so much more.

I have to say, I've always felt similarly about Vonnegut. Even when I was in high school, it felt like "high school intellectualism." One of the defining moments in my literary development was when I literally threw "Cat's Cradle" across the room after slogging through its last insufferable page during my junior year.

It's funny that I don't lio Vonnegut, though, because I have a great deal of respect for some of his contemporaries and folllwers. I love Walter M. Miller's "A Canticle for Leibowitz," which has some Vonnegut-esque elements and is generally lumped in with the satirical and ironic science fiction that was so popular in the '60s and '70s.

I also love John Irving, a clear and unashamed Vonnegut acolyte. A Prayer for Owen Meany would rank pretty high on my all-time novels list, if such a thing were to exist. And I've also been known to dig a bit of Tom Robbins from time to time, and I challenge you to find a writer more derivative of KVJ.

But... with Vonnegut, I just can't do it. Something's missing for me. My favorite thing if his that I've read is "Long Walk to Forever" from "Welcome to the Monkeyhouse," and it might be the least Vonnegut-esque thing he wrote.

It might be that I'm a bit of an SF-head. I like my SF deep and thoughtful, with limited whimsy and preferably no satire. I think it's an underrated genre that at its best (Gene Wolfe, Ray Bradbury, Margaret Atwood) can really challenge the way we view the world and the future, as well as our own history of horror and violence.
Vonnegut pops up on a lot of SF readers' best-ever lists, and I get pissed off, because he takes the genre and idea of speculative fiction from he perspective of a snarky kid in the corner. I like Ray Bradbury, and I like Mark Twain. I don't need to read the crap that might be produced if they had a three-way with Loki, god of trickery and made-you-look.

/curmudgeon

Also, I'd feel like an ass if I didn't at least throw Salinger's name out there re: the best authors of the 20th century discussion. I just HAVE to do that, and I know it's cliché, but fuck it. That man was a genius.

Also, I've got a pretty big hard-on for James Joyce. I think he probably takes the cake for the 20th. But there's also Updike (so glad I finally read some Updike!), Steinbeck... blah.

yes. i think i did ha ha ha ha.

anyway-- time to move the discussion forward

and to say-- i don't hate vonnegut! why should i? he kept me very entertained one summer long ago.

is he a major author? surely not

does he suck? no fucking way!

at least in recollection. i'll have to say i haven't opened a book of his in years & years. but i remember them fondly. nothing wrong with them.

DON'T BE HATIN'

one more thing to add, i don't read novels for "intellectualism"-- i read novels to feel something. that's the difference between art and philosophy.

sure, intelligence is required, but it's not about "intellect"

how did nabokov put it? the tingle in the back of the spine.

art is not just a "head" thing-- the aesthetic experience is also of the body

intelligence and intellectualism are not the same thing

this is why godard made so many fucking boring movies. peddling a bunch of fucking "ideas" with no feeling or sensibility.

if you want an intellectual experience, read philosophy or science.

I guess it matters if the mind/body thing is more integrated? I really love complicated writing. Not sure if that's a fault of mine or not....it's sure what I seek out.

See, I also don't think Vonnegut is a BAD writer. Not at all. I don't love his style, but I love others who wrote in a similar style with perhaps less skill (like John Irving... seriously, I don't know — do people even really take him seriously anymore? Have they ever?)

But John Irving's prose gives me the tingle in the back of the neck. I read "The Cider House Rules" late in high school (movie was shit), and I thought it was absolutely beautiful in its roundabout description of heartache and fucked-up love (for fathers, father figures, significant others) that are bound to lead nowhere, and result in pain.

And "A Prayer For Owen Meany" zeroed in on the specter of my Catholic upbringing (by Episcopalian proxy) so vividly that it brought tears to my eyes. Again, the movie (Son Birch) was twice-shat doghit Hallmark sentimental nothingness).

So my beef with Vonnegut is not that his intellectualism is too "high school," because I don't need something to be intellectual for it to affect me, or to love the shit out of it (see: Superman, Kanye West, LOST). My beef with him is that his books have never given me a tingle!

Again, he strikes me as a satirist who is at once paying homage to, and making fun of, some weird amalgam of Mark Twain and Ray Bradbury. But I got a tingle from "Inherent Vice," and from "Illuminatus!" etc. it's just something about his style. Intellectual or non-intellectual... if just doesn't tickle me.

But I do relate to the "high school intellectualism" comment because ... when I was in high school, all the kids who really wanted to come across as smart seemed to love love love Vonnegut and make a big hairy deal about it. Has noting to do with Vonnegut himself, but I think those please-think-me-a-literary-gent! types just gravitate to him like a goddamn electro-magnet.

On the point about 'high school intellectualism' it struck me recently that most heroes in classic novels are now considerably younger than I am, and that while I once related to their energy, anger, etc., I find that more difficult now unless I try to remember how I was when I 1st read them. Raskolnikov makes sense to a young man coping with his own superman complex but less so when things like ambition seem less and less important. So in many ways I'd say most novels are a bit 'high school' in that theyire generally written by young men and women and as such overwhelmingly tend to concentrate on anxieties unique to their generation.

Obviously I can think of plenty of great novels that don't qualify but I'd still say they're very much in the minority.

i get what you're saying, i'm like that with music. i like bloated, overcomplicated, prog/math rock shit. i'll have 20 time signature changes please, thanks. but if you play that at a party you kill everyone.

one has to be able to move across the range and appreciate different things.

the ramones were great and revolutionary, but at the same time if i listen to them for too long i'm bored to tears cuz everything sounds the saaaaaaaame.

so who's better? the ramones or yes? lololol. ah ha ha ha. hm.... i'm not saying. each has their place.

it's a bit like steppenwolf no? (the novel, not the classic rock stuff). serious intellectual man from the early XX century who listens to classical music wants to off himself but discovers hashish and jazz (not lincoln center jazz, but whorehouse & speakeasy jazz) and learns to be happy.

yes, i know, hesse is also literature for highschoolers, but for my money it's among the best in the genre. was huge for me at the time.

and also-- demonyo is so fucking right about the young hero thing. i hadn' t thought of it (thanks).

anyway i'm off to read a book of hot letters that kathy acker wrote to her summer fling. apparently it's some sort of important something so the MIT nerds had to get them published.

well an interesting discussion. I don't hear too much on this about Beckett, though, or M Brodsky. And, to me, without them, it's just a discussion of GOOD lit, not great lit.

Bro. Hesse is not "high school." Let's not get bogged down by that designation.

And yes about the age thing. Definitely. But the best novels hit you at different levels and continue to be relevant to the human experience though life.

"Catcher in the Rye" (btw: who's more "high school" than Holden C.? Doesn't mean Salinger wasn't an almost overactive intellect -- see "Seymour, An Introduction[/i]) still brings tears to my eyes. Still has a deep and almost painful effect on me, perhaps more so than it did when I was 15 and reading it like a 15 year-old would.

It becomes an adult novel as the reader becomes an adult, follows you (or me, at least) through life. Just as "Franny and Zooey," continued to feel relevant after my 20s, in new and unexpected ways.

EDITED TO ADD: Be straight with me, do I sound like a total fucking dullard for bringing up Salinger in a conversation about the 20th century's best literature? I mean... it is brilliant, isn't it? ... isn't it? Like, universally? Eh?

I see Catcher in the Rye as more of a cult book than a great one, in the same bracket as something like Breakfast at Tiffany's or On the Road or L'Estranger, where reading them is almost a rite of passage for a lot of people. But then I haven't read it since I was a teenager, on the (maybe wrong) assumption that was the best and only time to do so.

I agree. Sometimes a character that dominates a book when you're young (and about whom the book seems ultimately about) is replaced by another character in the same book who seemed marginal when you 1st read it but becomes the one you really click with when you re-read it later on. I can't think of an example off the top of my head but I'm sure it must happen.

severino sometimes you focus on the oddest stuff. i mean that because this is a total tangent and not the point i was trying to make.

i don't know about you but i read demian and steppenwolf plus other things when i was 17/18/19. it was formative--or deformative (in a good way). it blew my mind of course at the time, but then he was derivative wasn't he? "illustrated jung". a lot of people don't take him seriously, criticize his way of writing, whatever. and yet-- he was great for me at that age. couldn't read him again at this point though.

also i could never get into the glass bead stuff. got too ponderous, i lost patience. but he had done his work already. many years later i read siddharta and it was "okay."

as for catcher in the rye-- it's very significant to a lot of people. i don't think it's a great book but it's a good one, and it's aimed at teenagers, no? i mean the original target audience were grownups, but the ones who took it to heart were the kids. and rightfully so. were there even teenagers before that book?

funny thing, i was talking with a friend about that book recently--independent of our conversations here. also saw it mentioned by woody allen not long ago.

anyway...


i don't know this brodsky-- only joseph.

so, beckett-- tell us what he does to you-- that's the interesting part. apparently he was the only one who understood joyce, or so joyce said.


the stranger! holy shit. yes. it's another of those books 18 year olds talked about incessantly where i grew up. i eventually read it and i was "and...?" i guess my country was more way more absurd than what happens in that novel.

the trial is more like it

i mean, i know they're different, but-- the trial. holy shit. i'm never gonna be over THAT.

Wait a minutia ... are you calling me a high school intellectual? That's it!!


Nah, just fucking round. Sorry.

I do focus on the oddest stuff, and I'm really into tangents, but I still think what I said was relevant to at least some parts of the discussion. Think. I'm not sure.

I read Steppenwolf and Siddartha at about 19. Thought they were both tremendous at the time. Haven't thought about either much. Unlike Carcher, which was really one of my first experiences reading something "good" for pleasure. It sticks with me, and I think about it fairly regularly -- have done so for almost 25 years now, so it's a special one for me, as it is for many many people. Not as special as Franny and Zooey or Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters, or "A Perfect Day for Bananfish," but still ... I'm a sucker for some Holden.

but when I mentioned Salinger, I meant ... Salinger. Not just Catcher. I was curious about whether or not my personal feelings, and the influence of my English professor mother, have made me biased. Was wondering if anyone else thought he belonged in a discussion of best 20th century literature.

But yeah I'm an odd duck man. I'm all over the place.

I genuinely think 100 Years of Solitude is in the running for best novel of the 20th century, though. Not that I've read a fraction of tjof 20th century's novels, but I've read a lot of those that are deemed classics, and it's a contender, for sure.

Ok at this point I'm just saying stuff as it pops into my head. Things are weird in my life right now. I need to blah a little.

lol things are weird in my life too

just listening to rinse & repeat spewing bullshit on press the meat

ugh!

OhMyGod Sweden.
I hear you. We're officially living in the alternate 1985, where Biff Tannen kept the book (Back to the Future II).

Seriously, watch that movie, tell me it doesn't look a lot like whatever the fuck is going on right now.

I also have some personal shit going on, so not super articulate er whatever. It's not necessarily bad, this personal shit, but definitely different. Freaking out about it a bit.

Have been working on a paper on memoir/fictional memoir kinda mindfuck and in one text I am reading right now, called "Fictions of the Self" the author used a Pynchon quote. I feel like I should read him more, he is hilarious. I've only read "The Crying of Lot 49" so far, the others always seemed too long... can anyone recommend me one of his books to get a bit more into him? It would be much appreciated !