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I read Concrete by Thomas Bernhard today. Basically the ramblings of a crazy old german guy in 120 pages with maybe four or five paragraph breaks. Best part was the last 15 or so pages, and when he goes on an absolutely bonkers rant about dogs. I'm going to read Galveston next because I'm a big fan of True Detective right now and I want to see how Pizzolatto's work looks in novel form. It's apparently McCarthy-esque airport fiction, which is a confusing way to sell a book, but it was $3 so what the hell.
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Feb 18, 2014 07:32
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 17:09 |
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Mr. Squishy posted:All of his novellas are like that, but I think the ones I've read are pretty powerful. Apparently he did plays and such with regular speaking parts and so on, which surprised me given how monomaniacal his books are. His will forbade their production in his native Austria as a final gently caress-you. He also directly inspired William Gaddis' final novel where a bed-ridden author tries to marshal his sources for an essay on player pianos. Yeah I'm familiar with his style, I have also read The Lime Works. I'd like to read Agape Agape but I'm not feeling too rushed because I finished The Recognitions last month, which was a fantastic read but probably enough Gaddis for me to last at least another six months. EDIT: I would love to read some of Bernhard's plays, are they available anywhere? Slackerish fucked around with this message at 15:01 on Feb 18, 2014 |
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Feb 18, 2014 14:59
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Mr. Squishy posted:How did you find it? I'm doing an on-and-off reread of that at the moment, with Steven Moore's monumental annotations and after reading a couple of the source books, and it's dispiriting to see some passages as being pretty much undigested. I waited off on reading it for like, a year, because people said it was so difficult. And certainly there are parts, namely the scene where Wyatt returns home where the annotations are pretty valuable but I thought that Gravtiy's Rainbow was a bigger challenge in the realm of the post-war tomes. It's dense, yeah, but if you pay attention it's not that hard. I do feel like I need to reread it at some point to get everything Gaddis was trying to say. I'd really like to read JR, maybe over the summer. I've read the first 50 pages or so like three separate times and I always get lost but I think that's because I don't put focus on it/I'm always reading other poo poo/I hear it gets easier the more you read.
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Feb 18, 2014 17:02
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Mr. Squishy posted:I suspect that a large reason why people find it hard going is that they get lost in the party scenes. Lots of voices saying lots of snippets of conversations. If you can't follow who's who, not only are you lost for large chunks at a time, you're also missing out on the fun bits. that's true, the other part I found pretty difficult was the scene where recktall brown dies. It took me like four months to read the book and I didn't realize how many characters they recalled from France until I looked over the annotations Also, I've heard that JR gets easier because the fact that it's 95% dialogue makes it easier to pick up on characters' quirks in how they talk, while Recognitions seemed to split it's narrative between large chunks of prose and large chunks of dialogue, so it was harder to pick up on.
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Feb 18, 2014 21:41
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Mr. Squishy posted:Does anyone know what the point of The Sot-Weed Factor is? It's John Barth and I haven't read it but if it's like his other stuff then it's just extreme metafiction, basically.
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Mar 11, 2014 03:46
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 17:09 |
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Has anyone here read A Naked Singularity? I've heard good things but I read the first 20 or so pages and it felt like DeLillo pastiche and I'm not a huge DeLillo fan in the first place.
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Mar 17, 2014 08:51
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