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/lit/ - Literature

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18671000 No.18671000 [Reply] [Original]

I am utterly in awe of his genius. Anyone else think he is the best American novelist of the 20th century? I can only kneel before his sheer artistic excellence.

>> No.18671045

I'm not mad at the choice but pynchon has more good novels and gr is just as good as the recognitions. Againat the day rivals jr as well.
If we're going back to the modernist era you gotta mention faulkner and woolf. Some people here would say joyce. I wouldn't.
Does dos passos belong? I need to read more, but i liked the usa trilogy more than any joyce i've read.
A big sleeper that both gaddis and i would put forward is thomas bernhard. If every book is as good as the 3 i read (the lime works, correction, the loser) then he's gotta be way up there. What an awesome novelist. Really, get correction.

>> No.18671047

>>18671000
That would be Faulkner

>> No.18671052

>>18671045
I also want to add that gaddis discovered bernhard later in life and wrote agape agape under bernhard's influence.

>> No.18671055

>>18671045
>Some people here would say joyce. I wouldn't.
Neither would I. I don't trust him. He has an awfully strange accent for an American...

>> No.18671056

>>18671047
corncobby

>> No.18671065

>>18671056
Nabokov says in a letter he only ever read one of Faulkner's novels. He just disliked southern literature.

>> No.18671123

>>18671065
He is corncobby though, as is much of American literature.

>> No.18671259

>>18671055
Lol i supposed it was all west best authors of 20c

>> No.18671325

Barth>pynchon>faulkner>gaddis>Dos passos>Nabokov>Steinbeck>fitzgerald>Delillo>hemingway

>> No.18671343

>>18671325
>no Salinger
disregarded

>> No.18671366

>>18671343
As novelist? Not worthy of inclusion. Hemingway only deserves inclusion because of the influence of his style

>> No.18671392

>>18671123
what does that even mean

>> No.18671407

>>18671392
I take it as rural, uneducated, corny kitsch without irony.
I disagree w him tho

>> No.18671417

>>18671407
shit nigga if thats what he means by that hes a fucking idiot

>> No.18671439

>>18671417
t. faulknerfag
Still doe:
Take it easy lil nigga the terms are pretty ambiguous.

>> No.18671442

>>18671325
You have poor taste

>> No.18671500

>>18671442
What's yours, faggot? Where do u disagree?

>> No.18671614

>>18671366
If you are judging in terms of influence why isn't Stein on it?

>> No.18671685

>>18671614
Because i dont read much of her shit. She's not really considered a great novelist.
Do you think i'm fucking omnicient? This is how we do this: i spitball my ideas, you spitball yours. Give me a list faggot

>> No.18671719

>>18671685
I'm not autistic enough to make a tier list of American novelists. But in terms of influence, Stein is probably the most influential of them all. Twain, Faulkner, and Barth would all be up there.

>> No.18671762

>>18671719
Of 20c but yeah i agree. Influence only allows ppl a spot on my list, not sway on it. Who ranks the "top american novelists of 20c" by putting what everybody else likes on it? Gertrude stein: yeah, sure, maybe influential and yada yada yada but reading her sucks balls. Pseuds try to be objective, i just like things.

>> No.18672954

>>18671000
yeah I think Recognitions is the best book ever written in English. I love Gaddis and have read all of his letters, his work as a technical writer and script writer, biographies of him, I'm infatuated with his work and actually don't like anything other than The Recognitions that much, but it alone is just by far the best thing I've ever read
It's also interesting that Once at Antietam (the Civil War play he wrote but never got produced, a lot of which is reproduced in AFoHO) is just so fucking shockingly bad and pretentious. Carpenter's Gothic and Agape Agape are also pretty underwhelming
It's tough to say whether something like Oblomov or In Search of Lost Time are better because I can't read Russian or French

>> No.18673031
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18673031

Can we turn this into another Recognitions thread?

Why do you guys think Don Bildow let Anselm babysit his daughter? I wouldn't let a daughter near him if she was five. I wouldn't even if she was one, I wouldn't even trust him as a baby-sitter, you know? I'm not kidding, I wouldn't.

>> No.18673121

>>18671000
Absolutely yes recognitions is best book
>>18671045
Gr is gay and pynchon is ugly
>>18671047
This too is true

>> No.18673715

>>18673031
spoiler m8

>> No.18674245

>>18673031
I honestly think it was just for comedic effect. You see it in comedies all the time, the whole “Hey, aren’t you supposed to be…” and Gaddis said himself he liked to include jokes in his books. I don’t think the “Merry Christmas” scene has any real reason for being there but it’s a damn funny scene.
>>18673715
It happens like 150 pages into the book and it’s a running joke for the next 800 pages.

>> No.18675433

>>18671000
For me, it's Theroux, Gaddis, and Wainhouse.

>> No.18675443

>>18673031
>>18674245
I think it was just another effect of Gaddis constantly makes pedo jokes about the New York critics/artists and even the priests and monks but Anselm still seems like the worst person to leave a child with because of his unhinged autistic outbursts.

>> No.18675447

>>18671065
I wonder if it was Sanctuary

>> No.18675851

>>18675433
>Alexander Theroux

Dangerously based

>> No.18675875

No, but he’s better than DeLOLlo and Thomas Pinkcock

>> No.18676191

>>18675443
well yeah but also Anselm is literally a pedo who castrates himself with a razor in the subway bathroom because he's so distraught over his sexual urges[/spoiler

>> No.18676211

>>18671325
holy shit Barth is still alive? I thought he died in the 80s

>> No.18676249

>>18676191
True but that is sort of related to the whole 'Anselm feeling like he is the only one that confronts sin' even if he is completely insane.

>> No.18676467

Didn't author William Gaddis develop rhinophyma from chronic alcoholism?

>> No.18676560

>>18676191
Was Anselm really a pedophile? There's one scene where Max claims that he is but Max could have been bullshitting there

>> No.18677091

>>18676560
I could've sworn it was implied at the very end that Bildow's daughter was pregnant or something, even though she was probably too young for that to be possible.
Anselm, Max, and the critic in the green wool shirt all accused each other of being pedos, I think. They might all be, or they might all not be. I feel like "the party crowd" was almost just one giant faceless character without internally consistent characterizations for individuals and more just a mass of them. Like a bunch of people all melted together into a monster that exists to piss off Anselm and terrify Stanley.

>> No.18677108

>>18677091
I could be remembering wrong but I thought it just implied Bildow's daughter had an illness. I could have missed something though and the illness was related to pregnancy.

>> No.18678079

>>18677091
>>18677108
Bildow's daughter was "swollen" and that's basically all we know. I thought it was more explicit that he was a pedo but maybe not

>> No.18678865

>>18671325
>Barth
Based.

>> No.18679885

>>18671325
Barth? More like Barf. An absolute turd of a writer.