Don DeLillo...a disappointment?

there are lots of sex scenes. some of them are 'comic'. there is a character called 'Hughes Tool'.

chauncey worthington

I am partial to DeLillo but everyone I've ever talked to has some problem with his style. I always recommend the more entertaining stuff - Underworld, even though it's long - is fun. Maybe that's trite to say, but the set pieces really are that. It helps to be in the right mood to read him. He seems to me to channel things going on in our culture. A channel is a just a vehicle for communicating something and maybe that's why his prose feels empty.

it's weird that you've only ever talked to people who are rong

Yes. Or they lack good taste in writers.

j. is so confident of winning this case, he can waste the jury's time by reading to them from this article: Rate the Super Hunks.

no jury in the world, man

Running Dog is a treat, certainly, and a good cure for reader's block. I've breezed through the first eighty-five pages; decent action and no haterbait in sight - well there's the odd bit of dialogue where one character repeats the other's words ("One character repeats the other's words.") but I can live with that. And I'm still guessing where it's going.

ha, i found running dog kind of a slog but loved what it pulled out of its hat in the last reel

there's the odd bit of dialogue where one character repeats the other's words ("One character repeats the other's words.")

this is all of his novels!!

the sorta ... distance between participants in conversation in DD's books is one of his strong suits imo

Great Jones Street is pretty cool too. I really don't think any writer has the kind of voice DeLillo has. Maybe I haven't read enough, but the way his dialogue works, the humor, and many other things - he seems singular to me. Oh, how I love the man.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/behold/2014/04/27/luca_zanier_photographs_the_energy_industry_in_his_series_space_and_energy.html?wpisrc=obnetwork

White Noise is hilarious. I should read more of this guy

Libra is hilarious

Body Artist, not hilarious.

also no good.

pro body artist

interested in inverse proportion to square root of length really

http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/06/garbage-everywhere/373118/

https://newrepublic.com/minutes/137755/heres-fun-rumor-nobel-prize-literature

^^^the *only* reason to share it between DL and PR is to troll PR one last vast time

per the thread: pynchon rocks and delillo sucks

The kind of writer that Pynchon is has never won a Nobel so yeah Delillo (by himself) is a good bet

Well, then it's about time! Oh, if Pynchon wins, I will be dancing all day. And then get astonishingly drunk. Fucking hell, I want Pynchon to win so bad.

Oh, just read the article, it's about Philip Roth instead... I think an expert article on the Nobel would know that the prize has actually been split four times (Danes Karl Gjellerup and Henrik Pontoppidan split in 1917) and wouldn't mix up Migeul Asturias with Nelly Sachs. So in conclusion, the article is wrong, therefore Pynchon is destined to win.

👍

btw I only said that bcz -- when I last looked at the list of winners -- it seemed that the really great writers of a particular movement or undercurrent or scene seldom win: Beckett not Joyce, Kawabata not Mishima, Simon not Duras, Marquez not Borges. So the winner of er American encyclopedic novel should be Pynchon but it'll be Delillo.

dude beckett >>>>> joyce

i am not looking forward to the pinefox's return to this thread :)

xp. borges is not a boom writer. marquez and vargas llosa both winning the nobel means the boom is one movement where you can say pretty definitively that the best writers from it won the nobel

I know but I think its fair to say that in people's minds Borges is the father of modern Latin American fiction and a precursor of the boom. I know it doesn't stick.

beckett >>>>> joyce

Flann O'Brien ftw

(Would've agreed, have been off Joyce till I started reading parts of the Wake via that twitter account. But again they aren't like one another anyway, just seen as part of the same 'scene')

LOL now looking at that list on wiki and more exampels: Mann not Rilke, Jelinek not Bernhard, Gide not Proust, Seferis not Cavafy, Canetti not Musil, Pasternak not Tsvetaeva, Saramago not Pessoa.

Even if I like quite a few of the writers that have won its such a load of rub!

marquez and vargas llosa both winning the nobel means the boom is one movement where you can say pretty definitively that the best writers from it won the nobel

― ælərdaɪs (jim in vancouver), Wednesday, October 12, 2016 2:47 PM (six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

except neruda was not a better writer than borges, but you can argue that borges didn't win it for political reasons, sure

i always thought cortazar was a better writer than marquez. llosa wrote maybe one decent book. yet the writer who encompasses all the boom's qualities is the one who did it the worse in my opinion -- marquez

neruda and borges is the right generation but very different writers. i expect it was more the great mass popularity of neruda that probably swung the judges.

vargas llosa's first three novels are all great imo, and several of his later works are decent

best way to look at the nobel prize is as a pretty arbitrary thing that isn't that important other than for that year's laureate and their fans

A lot of time the best die young. But Marquez was pretty clearly the right boom winner, if only for Autumn of the Patriarch. I used to love Cortazar, but the latest short story collection I tried and make my way through was severely disappointing. I'd take Juan Rulfo every day of the week instead.

best way to look at the nobel prize is as a pretty arbitrary thing that isn't that important other than for that year's laureate and their fans

WHERE'S THE FUN IN THAT?

*starts busily reading all the winners in order*

if you listen to old peruvian dudes tell stories, you'll be reminded of vargas llosa, because he just formalized a type of popular storytelling from peru. his works do get more academic, because i guess he was a fan of russian formalism

i kind of got tired of it because i heard a bunch of old peruvian dudes tell stories in the same fashion

weirdly la catedral is the one i think is his only decent book

Neruda not Vallejo!!

I really liked One Hundred Years of Solitude when I read it a few years ago. Wonder how it stands up today. Pedro Paramo is really good.

Actually I don't know if Latin American existentialism has ever won the Nobel

juan rulfo is good stuff too

when i was a kid and into socialism, vallejo really spoke to me, as did all his melancholic verses

neruda always sounded cheesy to me, but i've grown to like a few of his poems

Yeah I like Neruda but Vallejo is all-time (esp the Spain take this cup away from me cycle) (Ok I suppose Vallejo would've been not that well-known in the 30s but I like to think there is some kind of guilt involved, like lets give Beckett the prize because its safe to do so now Modernism is accepted)

Nobel def go for kinda boring literary careerism if anything: Mann is like the perfect caricature of a Nobel winner. I think Borges didn't win, not bcz of politics (look at Mann's nationalism, Llosa is dodgy isn't he?) but because he wasn't that industrious and way past his best. His repute is based on a dozen short stories and a handful of essays. More than enough given what he wrote but these people are idiots.

it's worth looking through the blurbs they give winners, the phrase "lofty idealism" crops up a LOT :D

kipling and hamsun had *way* dodgier politics than borges or llosa (tho hamsun's turn to the dark side may have been after his prize)

It was after yeah (and it was given for Growth of the Soil which no one gives a shit about)

More dodgy pols: Eliot and LOL Churchill

oh man llosa is super dodgy, flip flopping. he wanted to run for president in the 90s but he's definitely not a politician and if memory serves, he was considered way too intellectual and not practical enough

you're right about borges, but it seems to me neruda's popularity increased because he was riding the socialist wave that was so big in south america. maybe i'm being cynical but he seemed to play his cards right, whereas borges took a huge gamble speaking out against the atrocities peron committed, but this is the machiavellic attitude of latin american politics that so many leftists are comfortable with

borges was a small c conservative who backed the dictatorship in argentina in the 70s - for a while, was later bit put off by the body count. neruda was a stalinist.

with all the promises that the peron gov't had made, who wouldn't support it? the difference is when the "body count" was released, borges had the decency to come to his senses

borges never supported peron, but he was p happy with regular old military dictatorship.

neruda never voiced support, or criticism, of peron.

exactly, which is why i said "he played his cards right"

as they say in spanish, "se hizo el tonto"

Neruda was Chilean.

lol they speak spanish there buddy

and jim is referring to borges's meeting with pinochet, but that's a separate argument, and borges said that he had no idea what pinochet was involved in

neruda wasn't political opportunist, he was generally very true to his stalinism. criticizing peron wouldn't have been controversial, and in fact the communists in argentina weren't huge fans.

borges is no angel, as most latin american conservatives of his time he was quite happy for liberal democracy to be overturned if it helped keep the status quo - which in latin america was massive inequality and quasi-feudalism.