/lit/ - Literature

I'm sorry but it actually is Ulysses.

I guess if I have to just willfully ignore the best, I'll say The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald.

>And please, no Joyce.

>implying he isn't better than that spanish faggot

>>2808127

Never read it. Care to explain why do you think it as a so ingenious novel?

>>2808127
> praising Sebald

mein nigga

>>2808141

Sorry if I passed that impression, but I was just protecting myself from unimaginative responses. But I do think that, in terms of creation of a complex and interesting book, Borges takes the cake.

Borges was the first latin american to read and review Ulysses. He thought it had its moments but would take many days and "many siestas" to read. He thought, like all lucid men, that Finnegans Wake was garbage.

I'd nominate Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius as the most ingenious short story. The Dead is also a pretty flawless short story.

Finnegans Wake of course.

>>2808166
Trolls can't resist it.

>>2808166
I find FW offensive. To think Joyce wanted readers to dedicate their lives to reading this hodge-podge. Fuck him. What an asshole. I have a life to live and I'm not going to live it to redeem Joyce from having written a boring book that no one reads.

Interesting tidbit. After FW, Joyce wanted to write a "short novel about the sea." That probably would have been good and not retarded.

people actually like Joyce?

half of his books is him bitching about how much he hates Catholics,

>>2808189
I lol'd.

Truth.

>>2808142

It's an elaborate tapestry of pattern and intertext. And the use of photographs is interesting because it actually plays within the visual patterns that the text employs.

>>2808177

"The only thing I ask of my reader is that spend their entire lives studying my work" - James "motherfucking" Joyce

>>2808189
>>2808194
>>2808177

plebs are out in full force today

Funny how you ask for something and people just can't put their minds into anything alse than what you ask they didn't do.

>>2808209

You are the pleb, sir. I asked a question, put the "no Joyce" sign and people continue to talk about him. Defending him just makes it worse. Talk somewhere else about him.

>>2808199

thx

>>2808209
Bloom says he wishes that Joyce had put his talents to something more people could read.

He says FW isn't available even to the uncommon reader and after 50 years of reading it he still can't unlock it.

He also prefers Proust over Joyce.

Status: Told

Italo Calvino's If a traleveler on a winters night. You can clearly see a shadow of Borges hovering above the book, but it doesn't make it any less awesome. My friends edition came with a diagram made by Calvino explaining his construction of the book.

>>2808235
pretentious, patronizing garbage

>>2808225

Source? I'd like to read more about Bloom's opinion of Joyce.

>>2808249
Not one specific source. He's cited his preference for Proust all over the place. He claims to reread all of In Search of Lost Time every year.

I believe it was in an interview where he said that Joyce is extremely "original" and no doubt a genius, but he wished that he used his talents for something more universally accessible.

In Genius (the book) he says that Ulysses is accessible to the "uncommon reader" who is dedicated but Finnegans Wake is not even accessible to the uncommon reader and that he needs to use reading guides to read FW. But then he also says that FW is his masterpiece.

I think Bloom is trying to be objective in saying that FW is his best an is aesthetically really good, but he just doesn't like it as much as Ulysses or Proust.

Nabokov called FW a "dull pudding of a book...a persistent snore in the next room" and Borges said FW had "some sentences not unworthy of Shakespeare or Browne" and he quotes "hither and tithering waters of. Night!" but then says that Lewis Carroll did it better.

>>2808225
>He says FW isn't available even to the uncommon reader and after 50 years of reading it he still can't unlock it.
>He also prefers Proust over Joyce.

He's obviously bitter that not even him, the idol of the white heterosexual academics, can't read FW. So he just takes an equally praised work that he can understand and goes on saying that it's better when it probably isn't.

Not talking about my best here. But since you like Borges, Macedonio Fernandes is pretty awesome too. I read the Museum of the Romance of Eternal, or whatever its name is in English.

Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas might be my best.

Joyce is an ingenious fraud. He's better than Lacan. He made a hobby out of doing what any moderately well-read charlatan could do, ejaculate 70,000 lazy puns and meaningless forced allegories into a book, and convince people it's "deep" because they have to pore over their Introduction to Italian 101 knowledge to figure out what this or that facile portmanteau is, or wrack their brains to figure out how a snippet of gibberish with obvious ties to a previous snippet of gibberish ~evokes the subjective state of stream of consciousness~. He is lucky he came at a time when the "critical" study of literature was basically being invented from whole cloth, though. I guess they would have found someone else if it wasn't him.

It's a shame he wasn't classically educated, or he could have done it in a way that would have convinced anyone other than intellectual frauds like literature professors and their hipster students.

>>2808267
+1

>>2808261

He didn't say it's better. Just that he liked it better, which is quite coherent if it's too hard for him or something.

>>2808261
lol maybe. I think he's just saying in terms of influence, he's more original than Proust. His agon with Shakespeare is strong and complex. He says L. Bloom is the richest character since Shakespeare/Cervantes.

I don't know. He's a cooky old man.
>>2808267
I strongly agree. But I will say that The Dead is an amazing piece of art. I don't really bother with any of his other works. The Dead is great. Come on, that last page or so is heavenly.

>>2808267
>well-read charlatan could do, ejaculate 70,000 lazy puns
>implying any well-read charlatan could ever come up with 10,000 puns, let alone 70,000

>meaningless forced allegories into a book
That sounds like Borges, actually.

>and convince people it's "deep" because they have to pore over their Introduction to Italian 101 knowledge to figure out what this or that facile portmanteau is
If you change "italian 101" to "english and germanic literature 101", it's Borges again.

>wrack their brains to figure out how a snippet of gibberish with obvious ties to a previous snippet of gibberish ~evokes the subjective state of stream of consciousness~
It IS stream of consciousness, silly.

>"critical" study of literature
READING IS FOR ONLY FOR FUN AND ONLY WHAT I LIKE IS FUN GUYS

>I guess they would have found someone else if it wasn't him.
... like who? Who has ever done something like FW, in Joyce's time or in this time or in any time of literary history?

>It's a shame he wasn't classically educated
>implying perpetuating the classical tradition is the one and only way to contribute towards literature

>or he could have done it in a way that would have convinced anyone other than intellectual frauds like literature professors and their hipster students
That word again, i think you don't know what it means. And who else is to "convince"? And why would anyone have to "convince" anyone?

It's pretty hilarious how the OP of this thread actually thought saying "no Joyce" would deter people from mentioning Joyce. Wasn't it obvious it would have the exact opposite effect?

>>2808267
This only applies to Finnegans Wake.

>>2808288

OP here. I'm not here since>>2808228

>>2808262

Good post friend, or should I say amigo?, good call on Machado. Never read Macedonio Fernandes, but he was an influence for Borges, wasn't he?

ITT:
>Finnegans Wake is a troll
>Metanarrative circle jerk
A troll in this thread would be something by Palahniuk or Dan Brown. Metanarratives are all fine, I have nothing against them, but not all ingenious literature is tied up in that one "genre", or whatever you want to call it.

Que sais-je? Montaigne. Montaigne without doubt. He lacked our latest intellectual furniture, the undistilled murmurings of the Sanskrit and Chinese authors, with which our nearer contemporary philosophers and philosopher-novelists and grand philosopher-journalist-novelists crave affinity, but he was a great mountain. His spirit compassed all the wisdom of antiquity, and with the most charming affected modesty, and with the greatest contempt in the world for books.

Well, Ficciones would probably be my pick too, but I'll try to go with a few others:

-Oblivion by DFWalrus. Seriously. It's has last completed fiction collection and I think it's often better than Infinite Jest. So fucking insightful when it comes to self-consciousness and disillusionment.

-The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien. Not so much ingenious as it has moments of ingenious nonsense in sections concerning the scientist called DeSelby--some of the funniest stuff I've ever read. Like the part about people turning into bicycles who have to keep walking or they tip over. I was a bit disappointed with the ending though. On a side note, At Swim Two Birds is apparently one of the last books Joyce ever read and he liked it.

-Last night I finished the second book of the His Dark Materials trilogy. It's good in itself, but it's god-tier as far as young adult goes--especially with fluff like Harry Potter and Hunger Games. It concerns dark matter, theology, multiple universes and souls manifested as morphing animals that stop morphing when someone grows up. Just insanely creative books really.

>>2808127
Sebald is such a great writer, good choice.

Pale Fire.

>>2808433

I tried a Sebald once and thought it was atrocious. It had fog on the cover or something, something about clouds. Anodyne lit-fic tedium, Kashiguro style. Perhaps I'm being clueless though.

>>2808463

You know, when I read Pale Fire I really thought that I've reached the top of Nabokov. Little did I know about Sebastian Knight. Some call it a prelude to Pale Fire, like he was testing something he would latter show in its full glory. But for me it not like that. Sebastian Knight is more subtle, maybe less funny too, I'll give you that, nonetheless it's more deep, its gems are hidden far below than those of Pale Fire. It may sound just pretentious, however the more you delve in the swamp of secrets the more satisfying it is when you look at surface and recognize how cleverly hidden were those treasures.

Point is: I like Sebastian Knight better.

>>2808495
Yes, you're right. SK is brilliant. Overdue a reread.

>>2808473
I don't know what you are talking about. Try Vertigo. Really great book, the prose is excellent and it has this constant subtle note of depression and melancholy all the way through.

The Dream Songs by John Berryman; it's the self-dissection, cultural-dissection, and improvisational fabulation of an American scholar-poet who's slowly dissolving from alcohol and neurosis. Thse poems are tragicomic, idiosyncratic, immoral, learned, and completely original.

>>>I'd nominate Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius as the most ingenious short story. The Dead is also a pretty flawless short story.

I like your opinion, man.

As for me, the two most ingenious books I've ever read are

I don't have any paper so shut up. by Bruce Andrews

and

Seven Pages Missing, by Steve McCaffrey

>>2808326
> Macedonio Fernandez and Borges

Yeah, I think I read somewhere they exchanged letters an what not.

In one of those letters, one comments that he's been so distracted that on his way somewhere he suddenly notices he forgot to leave home.

One can only imagine the kind of absurd talks they shared.

Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban

(You won't have heard of it.)

>>2808520
>improvisational fabulation
Nice turn of phrase, Mr Bones.

They are still around us, the dead, but there are times when I think that perhaps they will soon be gone. Now that we have reached a point where the number of those alive on earth has doubled within just three decades, and will treble within the next generation, we need no longer fear the once overwhelming numbers of the dead. Their significance is visibly decreasing.

We can no longer speak of everlasting memory and the veneration of our forebears. On the contrary: the dead must now be cleared out of the way as quickly and comprehensively as possible. What mourner at a crematorium funeral has not thought, as the coffin moves into the furnace, that the way we now take leave of the dead is marked by ill-concealed and paltry haste? And the room allotted to them becomes smaller and smaller; they are often given notice to leave after only a few years. Where will their mortal remains go then how will they be disposed of?

>>2808794
I've heard of it.

It is a fact that there is agreat pressure on space, even here in the country. What must it be like in the cities inexorably moving toward the thirty million mark? Where will they all go, the dead of Buenos Aires and Sao Paolo, of Mexico City, Lagos and Cairo, Tokyo, Shanghai, and Bombay? Very few of them, probably, into a cool grave. And who has remembered them, who remembers them at all? To remember, to retain and to preserve, Pierre Bertaux wrote of the mutation of mankind even thirty years ago, was vitally important when population density was low, we manufactured few items, and nothing but space was present in abundance.

You could not do without anyone then, even after death. In the urban societies of the late twentieth century, on the other hand, where everyone is instantly replaceable and is really superfluous from birth, we have to keep throwing ballast overboard, forgetting everything that we might otherwise remember: youth, childhood, our origins, our forebears and ancestors. For a while the site called the Memorial Grove recently set up on the Internet may endure; here you can lay those particularly close to you to rest electronically and visit them. But this virtual cemetery, too, will dissolve into the ether, and the whole past will flow into a formless, indistinct, silent mass. And leaving a present without memory, in the face of a future that no individual mind can now envisage, in the end we shall ourselves relinquish life without feeling any need to linger at least for awhile, nor shall we be impelled to pay return visits from time to time.

>people either think joyce is a genius or a hack.

Me? I thought Ulysses could have been better, honestly. Gave it a 4/5 on goodreads. Proteus is beautiful but many of the early Bloom episodes are worthless.

'

bump

good topic

The Trial / The Metamorphosis

Or Absalom, Absalom!

>>2808209
this.
who cannot relate to Dubliners?
It's on par with Winesburg Ohio

>>2809637
>Absalom, Absalom!

Why? (I am serious).

>>2809687

It's one of the most beautifully written books I've ever read - I'm something of a plebeian so I can't give a very rigorous analysis of the work, but I read it as a tragic and violent look at the decay of the old Southern morality and the chaos that rose up in its absence, it's about a people's loss of identity and the struggle to retain virtue while coming to terms with that. Colonel Sutpen, one of the major characters, is one of the most frightening and enigmatic I've ever come across, and the way he tries to maintain a hold over the diaspora of his family, legitimate or otherwise, is terrifying in how it shows what lengths a man will go to to hold fast to his pride and his goals. I definitely need to read it again, I'm sure there's so much that I missed, but I absolutely loved it.

>>2809705

Thax, anon. Made me want to read it.

Hey OP. Ficciones was on my reading list, I'm on the first short story and holy shit omg
That is all

Mega bump.

Back from the dead. Bury it again if you dare.