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What's the most high falutin' fiction you've read?

Started by Catalogue of ills, October 20, 2021, 12:10:47 PM

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Dr Rock

Never tried Joyce or Pynchon.

I put forward these, I don't know if they are highfalutin though...

The Unbearable Lightness Of Being - Milan Kundera
. Liked it, read some other Kundera for a bit.

Done Camus and Kafka - there are plenty of short stories as good as Metamorphosis there, such as In the Penal Colony

The complete works of William Blake, one of my heroes.

Loads of Kurt Vonnegut, he's lovely.

Aldous Huxley, not just Brave New World but The Doors of Perception, Heaven and Hell, Ape and Essence and others.

Most excellent is Borges' Labyrinths, chock-full of minds-stretching tales, always with some cryptic meaning(s). In my novel that nearly got published I used 'The Garden of Forking Paths when I explained quantum theory's Many Worlds Interpretation.

Kankurette

Crime and Punishment is the tits. I was up until 3am reading it. Peel away all the Raskolnikov venting about übermenschen stuff and it's basically a kitchen sink drama/detective novel. I've read a couple of Austen, she's pretty funny, though I mainly wanted to read Emma cos I like Clueless. Tried Joyce's Ulysses, gave up, but Dubliners is great and actually readable (speaking of Irish writers, my dad was into Flann O'Brien, I like his stuff).

Also read The Trial, which was anticlimactic. Kurt Vonnegut is one of my faves. Galapagos and Deadeye Dick are my favourite books but there's a lot of competition.

Pranet

Also did an English degree. I was a very poor student and got a very bad degree but did at least do most of the reading. Ulysses? Sure. Clarissa? No problem. However got about 10 pages into Wings of a Dove by Henry James and thought fuck this.

Johnny Foreigner

Der Proceß (The Trial) was the first book we were given in the first year. Thankfully, I already knew German, but it must certainly have been hard for those students who had begun the degree without having learnt any German at school beforehand and were now supposed to plough through a Kafka novel. In der Strafkolonie (In the Penal Colony) struck me as a sick masochistic fantasy.

When we covered GDR literature, one of the novellas on the curriculum (which may have been by Wolfgang Hilbig; I forget) was about something and nothing at the same time. It was a story about the pollution of woodlands in East Germany, but there were no characters. He described brooks and rivulets and forests and the wind, but the book contained no people and no dialogue.

Dr Rock

Books you had to read don't count. Although feel free to talk about them xx

Mister Six

Quote from: Johnny Foreigner on October 23, 2021, 01:04:07 PM
When we covered GDR literature, one of the novellas on the curriculum (which may have been by Wolfgang Hilbig; I forget) was about something and nothing at the same time. It was a story about the pollution of woodlands in East Germany, but there were no characters. He described brooks and rivulets and forests and the wind, but the book contained no people and no dialogue.

Ooh, that sounds interesting. Can you remember anything about the author, or anything that might give a clue as to the title?

Johnny Foreigner

I'm trying to remember... It was twenty years ago. I thought it may have been Alte Abdeckerei, but I'm not so sure now; that is about someone wandering through a post-industrial wasteland. It may come to me yet.

Twit 2

Quote from: Mister Six on October 21, 2021, 11:20:04 PM
Oh! I read the Society of the Spectacle this year, and reckon I understood most of it

Surprised you got past the title, as you couldn't manage the title of this thread. TRY AGAIN.

Mister Six

Quote from: Twit 2 on October 24, 2021, 10:24:55 AM
Surprised you got past the title, as you couldn't manage the title of this thread. TRY AGAIN.

Haha, I realised that afterwards. But YOU CAN'T TELL ME WHAT TO DO, YOU'RE NOT EVEN MY REAL DAD.

dissolute ocelot

I read Finnegan's Wake when I was 16, over a particularly boring summer. Didn't really understand it, but I enjoyed it like a crossword puzzle.

I did study English lit, but specialised in the American gothic tradition, so there was only limited time with the likes of Pope's Rape of the Lock and Dunciad. Pope is basically the 18th century equivalent of those Donald Trump's Christmas Carol Parody books you (I) get (every fucking Xmas), or Craig Brown's diary stretched out to a million pages, but he def wants you to think he's more falutin' than God.

I went through a phase of 60s British experimental literature a while ago: BS Johnson, Ann Quin, Christine Brooke-Rose, all of whom frequently attempted to write novels in which nothing happens (I blame the French). Johnson and Quin can be funny some of the time BUT NOT ALWAYS; later Quin and Brooke-Rose seem determined to write in the most obscure way about the most ordinary things. But Brooke-Rose's Out is a post-apocalyptic novel where all white people have been forced to become refugees in Africa, and still manages to be both boring and impenetrable. I remember a lot of passages about flies landing on stuff (African cliche!). Johnson's House Mother Normal is set in an OAPs home and tries to represent the deteriorating mental state of the residents by being increasingly like the babblings of a senile person.

Possibly the worst/most high falutin' is Will Self. His Umbrella is a bad Virginia Woolf pastiche, and others have said Woolf is so dull anyway. But writing an unoriginal pastiche nearly 100 years later is lazy as fuck, especially acting like you are a brilliant experimental literary genius and have a profound insight into psychoanalysis and know so many long words, when it's just fucking stream of consciousness which was invented in (Ed, check Wikipedia, thanks).

buttgammon

Quote from: dissolute ocelot on October 26, 2021, 10:53:55 AM
I went through a phase of 60s British experimental literature a while ago: BS Johnson, Ann Quin, Christine Brooke-Rose, all of whom frequently attempted to write novels in which nothing happens (I blame the French). Johnson and Quin can be funny some of the time BUT NOT ALWAYS; later Quin and Brooke-Rose seem determined to write in the most obscure way about the most ordinary things. But Brooke-Rose's Out is a post-apocalyptic novel where all white people have been forced to become refugees in Africa, and still manages to be both boring and impenetrable. I remember a lot of passages about flies landing on stuff (African cliche!). Johnson's House Mother Normal is set in an OAPs home and tries to represent the deteriorating mental state of the residents by being increasingly like the babblings of a senile person.

Possibly the worst/most high falutin' is Will Self. His Umbrella is a bad Virginia Woolf pastiche, and others have said Woolf is so dull anyway. But writing an unoriginal pastiche nearly 100 years later is lazy as fuck, especially acting like you are a brilliant experimental literary genius and have a profound insight into psychoanalysis and know so many long words, when it's just fucking stream of consciousness which was invented in (Ed, check Wikipedia, thanks).


I haven't read that much Brooke-Rose, but Quin and Johnson are two writers I really like. The thing about them is that their experiments don't always come off; I do actually like House Mother Normal, but it's one of those books from that time that threatens to be all form and content. Quin's longer books like Berg and Three are great but her shorter stuff is a mixed bag. There's a collection of her short fiction called The Unmapped Country that contains some great stuff, but also some pretty unsuccessful attempts at cut-ups and similar that are of their time in a bad way.

As for those French novels where nothing happens, I've tried and they do nothing for me. I love fun French writers from that time like Georges Perec but the sort of thing where someone describes a pair of curtains in painstaking technical detail just bores me.

I liked Will Self when I was younger but can't stand him now, especially his novels, which try way too hard to be high falutin'.

Famous Mortimer

Marguerite Duras is pretty brilliant, though (don't know if she's one of the French authors you're referring to).

Kankurette

The only Self book I've read is The Butt and it was one big load of 'what the fuck was the point?' The kind of thing where the story turns out to have all been for nothing.
Quote from: Johnny Foreigner on October 23, 2021, 01:04:07 PM
Der Proceß (The Trial) was the first book we were given in the first year. Thankfully, I already knew German, but it must certainly have been hard for those students who had begun the degree without having learnt any German at school beforehand and were now supposed to plough through a Kafka novel. In der Strafkolonie (In the Penal Colony) struck me as a sick masochistic fantasy.

When we covered GDR literature, one of the novellas on the curriculum (which may have been by Wolfgang Hilbig; I forget) was about something and nothing at the same time. It was a story about the pollution of woodlands in East Germany, but there were no characters. He described brooks and rivulets and forests and the wind, but the book contained no people and no dialogue.
Oh, sweet! Did you ever read Der fremde Freund by Christoph Hein? That was one of the books we got given in second year, it was about a doctor called Claudia who was a bit of an ice queen. My favourite German course was German Culture & Totalitarianism and it was about works written under the Nazis (Schlageter, a big old Nazi wankfest, and Peter Huchel's Herbstkantate, which was very subtly anti-Nazi) and the GDR (Der fremde Freund and something by Brecht, I think?) Assent & Dissent in the Third Reich was another one I loved.

We never got set foreign language literature at school, but IIRC we did read a bit of Metamorphosis.

chveik

Quote from: Famous Mortimer on October 26, 2021, 02:58:12 PM
Marguerite Duras is pretty brilliant, though (don't know if she's one of the French authors you're referring to).

i assume they're talking about the Nouveau Roman so yeah she was part of it in a way. and so were Beckett, Simon, Sarraute, all great writers

buttgammon

Quote from: Famous Mortimer on October 26, 2021, 02:58:12 PM
Marguerite Duras is pretty brilliant, though (don't know if she's one of the French authors you're referring to).

Quote from: chveik on October 26, 2021, 04:26:59 PM
i assume they're talking about the Nouveau Roman so yeah she was part of it in a way. and so were Beckett, Simon, Sarraute, all great writers

I've never actually got round to reading her stuff and I actually love Beckett's novels; it's Alain Robbe-Grillet I was having a pop at (not sure why I replaced blinds with curtains).

chveik

it's not going to change anyone's mind but i have to say: i don't find Woolf dull in the slightest. she's a top-tier modernist

Johnny Foreigner

Quote from: Kankurette on October 26, 2021, 04:04:13 PM
Oh, sweet! Did you ever read Der fremde Freund by Christoph Hein? That was one of the books we got given in second year, it was about a doctor called Claudia who was a bit of an ice queen. My favourite German course was German Culture & Totalitarianism and it was about works written under the Nazis (Schlageter, a big old Nazi wankfest, and Peter Huchel's Herbstkantate, which was very subtly anti-Nazi) and the GDR (Der fremde Freund and something by Brecht, I think?) Assent & Dissent in the Third Reich was another one I loved.

We never got set foreign language literature at school, but IIRC we did read a bit of Metamorphosis.

Gosh, I cannot imagine putting Schlageter on the curriculum, though I do know it. It's a drearious play written for Hitler's birthday by Hanns Johst, who was both a high-ranking SS officer and a literary author of some, if modest, ability. We read stuff by persecuted Jews or dissidents, but assigning actual Nazi literature to students—no, it would not have happened.

Never read Christoph Hein; read quite a lot of Brecht, both as an assignment and of my own volition.

One of the nicer things I recall about German literature was reading Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werthers in the first semester, and then in the second, Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. by Ulrich Plenzdorf, which is not a parody but uses elements of Goethe's original, transposed to an industrial GDR setting.

A propos books about nothing: Alte Meister by Thomas Bernhard is about a man sitting in a museum and drinking a glass of water for two or three hours. It's an amusing novel nonetheless. Can recommend anything by Bernhard; seen several of his plays performed an' all.

buttgammon

Quote from: chveik on October 26, 2021, 04:36:21 PM
it's not going to change anyone's mind but i have to say: i don't find Woolf dull in the slightest. she's a top-tier modernist

Agreed, she's brilliant.

Quote from: Johnny Foreigner on October 26, 2021, 04:40:09 PM
A propos books about nothing: Alte Meister by Thomas Bernhard is about a man sitting in a museum and drinking a glass of water for two or three hours. It's an amusing novel nonetheless. Can recommend anything by Bernhard; seen several of his plays performed an' all.

Bernhard is brilliant, such an angry and funny writer and probably even better in the original German.

Lisa Jesusandmarychain

Quote from: Pranet on October 23, 2021, 07:41:19 AM
Also did an English degree. I was a very poor student and got a very bad degree but did at least do most of the reading. Ulysses? Sure. Clarissa? No problem. However got about 10 pages into Wings of a Dove by Henry James and thought fuck this.

Did you try to cheat on that one by just listening to the single by Madness?
Seconded on the relative accessibility of Joyce's " Dubliners", I used to read it every year around Christmas time, but have got out of the habit in recent years. I just about got through " Ulysses" too, but read it without reading Home's "Odyssey" first ( I still havenae read it), so probably didn't get the maximum enjoyment out of it, it was bad enough going through all them footnotes. I used to know a young lad with an English MA who said he read " Ulysses" every year, I can well believe he did, I was ever so envious of him. I've only ever read about the reputation of " Finnegan's Wake", and thought " fuck that", not even attempted to read it. I remember reading an interview with John Sessions, who had been living in Canada and working on an uncompleted PHD on Joyce, and he said something like " you've got to realise that James Joyce went mad towards the end of his life, and " Finnegan's Wake" is a complete load of bollocks". This assessment by the intellectual titan Sessions ( this was pre- impersonating Keith Richards in " Stella Street", and very much pre- appearing in that film with that dog out of " Britain's Got Talent") was good enough for me.
Kurt Vonnegut should not have his name mentioned in a high- falutin' thread, a  highly accessible and funny writer, so he is.
Also partial to a bit of Virginia Woolf, but I * do* remember bailing on " Orlando".
This also presents me with another chance to tell one of my favourite gags:
Q: Who wrote " To The Lycanthrope"?
A: Why, Virginia Werewoolf,  of course! 😅

Catalogue of ills

Quote from: dissolute ocelot on October 26, 2021, 10:53:55 AM
I read Finnegan's Wake when I was 16, over a particularly boring summer. Didn't really understand it, but I enjoyed it like a crossword puzzle.

I did study English lit, but specialised in the American gothic tradition, so there was only limited time with the likes of Pope's Rape of the Lock and Dunciad. Pope is basically the 18th century equivalent of those Donald Trump's Christmas Carol Parody books you (I) get (every fucking Xmas), or Craig Brown's diary stretched out to a million pages, but he def wants you to think he's more falutin' than God.

I went through a phase of 60s British experimental literature a while ago: BS Johnson, Ann Quin, Christine Brooke-Rose, all of whom frequently attempted to write novels in which nothing happens (I blame the French). Johnson and Quin can be funny some of the time BUT NOT ALWAYS; later Quin and Brooke-Rose seem determined to write in the most obscure way about the most ordinary things. But Brooke-Rose's Out is a post-apocalyptic novel where all white people have been forced to become refugees in Africa, and still manages to be both boring and impenetrable. I remember a lot of passages about flies landing on stuff (African cliche!). Johnson's House Mother Normal is set in an OAPs home and tries to represent the deteriorating mental state of the residents by being increasingly like the babblings of a senile person.

Possibly the worst/most high falutin' is Will Self. His Umbrella is a bad Virginia Woolf pastiche, and others have said Woolf is so dull anyway. But writing an unoriginal pastiche nearly 100 years later is lazy as fuck, especially acting like you are a brilliant experimental literary genius and have a profound insight into psychoanalysis and know so many long words, when it's just fucking stream of consciousness which was invented in (Ed, check Wikipedia, thanks).

Berg by Ann Quin is very good, it has a particularly oppressive feel that sticks to you for a long time after reading it. I didn't particularly get on with Brooke-Rose's Amalgamemnon, that was pretty darn high falutin' actually, I don't think I was the target audience for that. I'm probably going to be the one dissenting voice on Will Self, I find him playful more than irritatingly highbrow and am probably the one person to have enjoyed Umbrella other than him Self.

Pranet

I used to read Will Self but I remember ploughing my way through How The Dead Live and deciding I was never going to read any of his fiction ever again. I had read everything up to that point.

spaghetamine

Infinite Jest was a slog at times and I can appreciate that DFW's writing style is not for everyone but I still enjoyed the hell out of it. Definitely a unique reading experience as you're constantly referring to the footnotes which pretty much comprise a whole other book's worth of material. I keep meaning to read it again as I finished it about a decade ago but honestly don't know if I could find the time these days.

Catalogue of ills

Quote from: spaghetamine on October 27, 2021, 05:16:44 PM
Infinite Jest was a slog at times and I can appreciate that DFW's writing style is not for everyone but I still enjoyed the hell out of it. Definitely a unique reading experience as you're constantly referring to the footnotes which pretty much comprise a whole other book's worth of material. I keep meaning to read it again as I finished it about a decade ago but honestly don't know if I could find the time these days.

Pale Fire is a similar experience, a great book in my opinion, one where the clever devices really work and aren't just showing off for the sake of it.