[!@#$%!]

^^ yo don't worry about the spoilers, i was just having a minor hallucination/daydream in which the camorra was privy to all major state secrets. you know, like, nuclear research, spy satellites, shit like that.

i guess having an atlantic city casino operator in the white house must have inspired this terrifying reverie.

-

now that i read that the vatican is in charge in that scenario it's totally not farfetched how i imagined it

but the casino operator got there first

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by _slavo_

 

this is easily the greatest book of the 20th century

people thought that the epic genre had died in modern literature but this is the #1 history of latin america

wish you could read it in spanish because it's sooooooooo funnyyyyyyyy. his slang...

if you're ever in the mood for something similar (not as ambitious but... just... fucking great) i wholeheartedly recommend LOS RIOS PROFUNDOS by josé maría arguedas.

it's centered in the andes not the caribbean and... wow! just one of the greatest books ever if not as famous as the generation of the boom.

[_slavo_]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

this is easily the greatest book of the 20th century

people thought that the epic genre had died in modern literature but this is the #1 history of latin america

wish you could read it in spanish because it's sooooooooo funnyyyyyyyy. his slang...

if you're ever in the mood for something similar (not as ambitious but... just... fucking great) i wholeheartedly recommend LOS RIOS PROFUNDOS by josé maría arguedas.

it's centered in the andes not the caribbean and... wow! just one of the greatest books ever if not as famous as the generation of the boom.

If I should be really honest with you - I didn't like it very much. I appreciate its enormous scope, it's take on social & family drama and description of atrocities and meaninglessness of war (and, last but not least, the wonderful magic reality elements), though what I hated was that basically every character in the book was called either Aureliano or Jose Arcado, and after 2 or 3 generations I was completely lost about who's who, which made the reading complicated.

People say, this book gets the better, the more times you read it. Maybe I should try it.

[!@#$%!]

ha ha ha ha ha yes! the names are a little mind-bending

in general the aurelianos are more philosophical and the jose arcadios more "action men" but over the generations it gets bananas

there's a book of interviews with garcia marquez where he tells the story of a russian reader who started building a genealogical tree of the buendías and wrote him to say that after reading the book she didn't know if she was crazy or if the crazy was garcía márquez.

anyway if you ever come across "los ríos profundos" it's not crazy like that-- the main character is a boy, and a sad one, and you look at the whole world more or less through his eyes, but what it does is it shows you a universe that you haven't seen before, i.e., the andes around the early/middle XX century, with its feudal social structure and the clash or fusion of andean and spanish culture-- and from within, not from the outside, which is the great part about it.

[Rob Instigator]

i have also read 100 years of....and found it to be insufferable.

[ilduclo]

100 Years and Marquez are certainly both excellent. "the greatest book of the 20th century"? Fuck, certainly NOT!

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by ilduclo

100 Years and Marquez are certainly both excellent. "the greatest book of the 20th century"? Fuck, certainly NOT!

well im not counting non-fiction like einstein's theory of relativity which arguably change the world

what would be your pick?

please don't say norman mailer or that incandenza guy ha ha ha

i'd count ulysses as "the heavyweight champion of the world" but how many people can actually read it and understand it?

and finnegan's wake is incomprehensible to me

and every time i attempted proust i've fallen asleep. so i guess my perspective is limited, that's true.

maybe best novel in the last half century (we're almost at the mark)

that shit is ALIVE

[ilduclo]

Starting the new Vollmann book "The Dying Grass". I've gotten real used to his way of writing and can handle and appreciate most of the digressions. He does go on about things. This one has a pretty good description of early photographic technology. I saw an interview and review of this book on a Seattle book review program, Vollmann said he liked to entertain himself, and that he had a special deal with his publishers to work for much less money to have greater control of his output.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/b...-vollmann.html

interivew http://www.tvw.org/watch/?customID=2015090033

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by ilduclo

Starting the new Vollmann book "The Dying Grass". I've gotten real used to his way of writing and can handle and appreciate most of the digressions. He does go on about things. This one has a pretty good description of early photographic technology. I saw an interview and review of this book on a Seattle book review program, Vollmann said he liked to entertain himself, and that he had a special deal with his publishers to work for much less money to have greater control of his output.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/b...-vollmann.html

interivew http://www.tvw.org/watch/?customID=2015090033

so you're saying the last book you read is the best book ever, more or less?

don't know about that

looks like a serious writer though

OF THE XXI CENTURY

[ilduclo]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

what would be your pick?

I'd have to say Borges short stories, Ficciones, maybe Naked Lunch or Soft Machine, certainly some Coetzee ( I really like Life and Times of Michael K and Foe), Robbe-Grillet's The Voyeur or In the Labyrinth, and I really like Bolano, esp Nazi Literature in the Americas, absolutely one of my favorite authors is Michael Brodsky, especially Detour (expanded 2003 version), ***, and Xman.

just sayin'

there's a LOT of good lit out there. Holy Moly!:

[ilduclo]

you know, I forgot Samuel Beckett! Malone, The Unnameable, and especially Watt, which is just fucking hilarious.

[Blood_Promise]

Originally Posted by ilduclo

you know, I forgot Samuel Beckett! Malone, The Unnameable, and especially Watt, which is just fucking hilarious.

I second this. But where's Kafka?

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by ilduclo

I'd have to say Borges short stories, Ficciones, maybe Naked Lunch or Soft Machine, certainly some Coetzee ( I really like Life and Times of Michael K and Foe), Robbe-Grillet's The Voyeur or In the Labyrinth, and I really like Bolano, esp Nazi Literature in the Americas, absolutely one of my favorite authors is Michael Brodsky, especially Detour (expanded 2003 version), ***, and Xman.

just sayin'

there's a LOT of good lit out there. Holy Moly!:

borges never wrote novels! i love borges and so did ggm (borges is melquíades), i find child rapist burroughs one of the most overrated writers ever-- not saying he's terrible, just overrated by a certain generation of english speakers-- bolaño is great, sure, but he wasn't a cataclysm. he's a good heir though. robbe-grillet has always left me cold.

i guess im confusing shit because first i said "best of the XX century" and then i said "last 50 years"

but anyway, everyone has their own biases. for latin america the guy was a fucking deluge-- there was a before and there was an after. he got a lot of hate eventually but it was mostly envy by minors that couldn't match him. still most people want to write LIKE HIM or AGAINST HIM. there are no neutrals.

he did for me what reading kafka did for him-- blew my fucking mind and it was never the same after. i've read it 3 or 4 times at different ages (first i must have been 12). i get why an irish would prefer ulysses, but if i had to reread i'd take the shit that's ON FIRE over the obscure and intellectual mass of references-- plus parnell wasn't my king so i don't feel him.

i suppose i relate to this novel in a much more carnal way than a north american or french reader-- for me to read him is not an intellectual exercise or a distant observation but I'M THERE with those characters. and i used to loooove love borges since i was 12 or 13 also, but delighted as i was, and as grateful, once you get the trick of it you can leave his stories rest, because you got the idea and that idea is what the story was about. and sure as the original pataphysical author (he would have never name himself that) he was also totally transformative so much respect for that. and yet-- his work was pretty limited when you think about it.

few people have shaken or changed literature like borges or garcia marquez-- kafka fuck yes, joyce fuck yes, cervantes fuck yes, pynchon even though i don't like him fuck yes, burroughs i don't think his cutups changed shit, but a lot of people are just doing long-form journalism and calling it novels, meh

[demonrail666]

For pure writing I'd say Lolita, but not being able to read Spanish I've obviously missed the subtleties in GGM's writing. For social insight I'd go with The Trial or The Great Gatsby.

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by demonrail666

For pure writing I'd say Lolita, but not being able to read Spanish I've obviously missed the subtleties in GGM's writing. For social insight I'd go with The Trial or The Great Gatsby.

great picks that totally stand up to history

[evollove]

The 20th century was breathtaking in the amount of great literature produced. Making a list, though, seems pointless. I'm incredibly well-read and I'm sure I've read .00001 of everything worth reading. The very best author of the 20th century is probably someone none of us has heard of.

[Rob Instigator]

I do not read enough fiction to comment on best novel of 20th century.

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by evollove

The 20th century was breathtaking in the amount of great literature produced. Making a list, though, seems pointless. I'm incredibly well-read and I'm sure I've read .00001 of everything worth reading. The very best author of the 20th century is probably someone none of us has heard of.

sure but name your favorites and say why

i mean one of the reasons i rate GGM so high is that with him latin american literature truly came of age in teh sense that a particular vision of the world finally found its shape in letters.

previously literature in the continent had been more or less european, an imitation and recycle of what happened across the atlantic, following more or less the currents that came out of spain first, paris later.

and there were some original figures there, but with some exceptions (maybe ricardo palma in peru, and machado de assis in brazil... sorry for names i can't recall off the top of my head) their visions weren't "of" the place but were european transplants "applied" to the americas.

like, the germans discovered the alps and suddenly we "discovered" american geography. so you put the andes or the amazon instead of the alps and same shit, go on with the poems about the sublime, blabla.

it goes on and on... "independence" took a long time culturally (more so than politically). i mean there were native cultures, and african cultures, but they never saw book form. you might hear them in stuff like the rumba, or chicha music, though. literature was mainly a "white" thing.

garcia marquez managed to finally create a vision that was properly latin american, mixing myth and folktale and history and town gossip and everything else. of course it had to be in the caribbean-- the biggest melting pot in history.

sure, he was a great admirer and disciple of faulkner so it's not like he invented everything he did. but the things he incorporated, the elements that are properly local, caribbean and colombian in his case, are what made his books a new thing completely. plus he's waaaaaay funnier and more imaginative and livelier than faulkner ever way.

he managed to give a mongrel culture a proper mongrel form-- and he was suddenly the vanguard, and no longer the imitator, when he did.

[evollove]

An author (totally forget who; a contemporary female) was asked why she liked Nabokov so much and she likened it to our reactions to certain people, why we have nothing to say to one person and another person we want to marry. It's unexplainable, chemical. The work is like a friendly voice talking directly to us. We get the author and the author gets us.

So you feel that way about GGM?

I feel that connection with bands more than authors; the sound of a human voice helps tremendously, I guess.

But I feel that way about Nabokov (funnily enough) with Updike trailing a little behind. Why? I could praise their mastery of form, etc etc, but really I don't know why. Lots of people write well. Why do I feel something like real affection for them? I have no idea.

[!@#$%!]

riiiight. i was supersad when he died-- like a real friend had died. sad also when he got sick and quit writing.

the thing is he didn't do that just to me-- he did it to a whole continent. seriously it was like the deluge. there was a before him and there was an after him.

he was at the same time encyclopedic and popular. he was superentertaining but he also engaged history, and the contemporary world. he was both highbrow and lowbrow--his books would sell at newspaper stands and would appear in the houses of people who never read. a sort of joyce-jackie collins combo.

borges was never peddled at street corners.

before he was a novelist he was an extremely popular journalist in colombia. papers would sell out while he'd tell the nation the tale of a shipwreck, in 14 installments.

he could tell you the biggest truth and spin a fantastic yarn at the same time, and pepper it all with jokes he'd hear from taxicab drivers.

the guy was a monster. probably a space alien, considering that what he did was so highly unusual.