yes!! I don't know about you, but I almost feel upset when a novel was described to me in a way that felt unappealing and boring…and then I'd come across it years later and realize how GOOD it was!
this is why I feel very strongly about emphasizing how Proust's In Search of Lost Time is full of gossip (not just ponderous, impenetrable lon…
yes!! I don't know about you, but I almost feel upset when a novel was described to me in a way that felt unappealing and boring…and then I'd come across it years later and realize how GOOD it was!
this is why I feel very strongly about emphasizing how Proust's In Search of Lost Time is full of gossip (not just ponderous, impenetrable long sentences about Art and Literature and so on)
another writer that (for me) was unfairly characterized in this vein is Cormac McCarthy! I'd understood him as this tremendously violent, literature bro, Western fantasy kind of guy…and then I read Blood Meridian and was amazed by how purely beautiful and reverential his descriptions of the American West are; he is SO good at describing landscapes and the emotional hold that those landscapes have on the viewer
fully agree, I think there's something "low status" about saying such things, but they are integral to good criticism
though that said, I read a McCarthy novel this year ('No Country' I think) and it was... a bloody thriller---which I did not enjoy. In that case, I wondered why everyone told me he was so literary!
yes!! I don't know about you, but I almost feel upset when a novel was described to me in a way that felt unappealing and boring…and then I'd come across it years later and realize how GOOD it was!
this is why I feel very strongly about emphasizing how Proust's In Search of Lost Time is full of gossip (not just ponderous, impenetrable long sentences about Art and Literature and so on)
another writer that (for me) was unfairly characterized in this vein is Cormac McCarthy! I'd understood him as this tremendously violent, literature bro, Western fantasy kind of guy…and then I read Blood Meridian and was amazed by how purely beautiful and reverential his descriptions of the American West are; he is SO good at describing landscapes and the emotional hold that those landscapes have on the viewer
fully agree, I think there's something "low status" about saying such things, but they are integral to good criticism
though that said, I read a McCarthy novel this year ('No Country' I think) and it was... a bloody thriller---which I did not enjoy. In that case, I wondered why everyone told me he was so literary!