(no subject)

[proximoception]

Authors I don't think I've read twenty pages of:

Musil
Camoens
Manzoni
Ekelof
Amichai
Pasternak
Gaskell
Dreiser
James Jones
Anne Bronte
Doeblin
Bachmann
Zola
Pindar
Ted Hughes

Billions of others of course. All of these I just didn't like the sound of, or the sound of the translations of. Either that or they seemed like they might be too much of a time commitment. Or whatever one thinks when one puts a book down so soon. I'm worst with this with novels. I think having read too many beginnings might be why I think of the novel as being so formless, when presumably it's almost never that.

I'm craving something totally new, among all the rereading I'm doing this term--Homer, Stevens, Tennyson and Whitman this weekend--is why I make this list. Maybe Musil's short stuff?

Comments

[localcharacter.livejournal.com]

Instead of all that rereading, you could just read Pessoa. Caiero gets you Homer, Reis gets you Tennyson, Pessoa-himself gets you Stevens, and Àlvaro de Campos = Whitman + bonus Marinetti just for fun.

Something totally new: W.G. Sebald? Machado de Assis? Thomas Bernhard?

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

Yep, them too. Reis also gets one to Saramago.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Pessoa I've read tons of, Bras Cubas I dropped partway through for some reason. Surprisingly, I have no idea who Bernhard is. Yes, maybe Sebald, I have a couple around. Austerlitz his best, or which?

[localcharacter.livejournal.com]

Emigrants may be the best place to start—Austerlitz may seem too much all at once.