Don DeLillo...a disappointment?

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.

he was a bit squeamish when the bodies started to pile up, which makes him more empathetic than many, but hardly unblemished.

gotta take off from work, but ya, i don't wholly agree with you

will try to reply later

we really took our eye off the ball in THIS thread

took yr 'troll PR one last vast time' line and ran wild

ya i'd love to discuss this further with jim but this is not the thread (it involves a lot of political understanding of latin american "left" and "right" and how they're not equal to left and rigth concepts as say americans or canadians think of them)

sorry

we really took our eye off the ball in THIS thread

― mark s, Thursday, 13 October 2016 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

A beat writer won it. My theory holds.

What do I win?

dylan not cohen

Sorry I just read James Morrison on the other thread. He wins.

ginsberg is considered dylan's life long mentor though and has pretty openly said he is influenced by him

xp

cohen more of a traditional beat poet, though, you're right

ok to bring this back to don delillo: really liked underworld but do you not feel he maybe goes too far with tying everything together with the idea of underworld. like there's some mafia dudes - UNDERWORLD - there's a guy doing graffiti in subway tunnels - UNDERWORLD - there's some nuclear waste being buried in Kazakhstan - UNDERWORLD, etc.

xp I was just riffing on xyzzz's "beckett not joyce" &c

philip roth on his agent's sofa, sadly watching the liver going cold for the last time

― mark s, Thursday, October 13, 2016 12:23 PM (eleven months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

(unsure why i said "for the last time" -- CLEARLY NOT FOR THE LAST TIME)

Trying to picture Martin Amis right now.

picture an entire body made of tin ear

- UNDERWORLD

Underworld was awful. The zapruder bit was awful. The bit about Edgar Hoover was awful. Some of the writing was amazingly skillful but AMERICA in all caps is such a banal subject.

jaoo-dae!

I think it was at least half a great book.

Probably never got more electrifying than the Pafko at the Wall opening unfortunately. Amazing piece of writing, that.

Any recommendations from the last decade or so of DeLillo novels?

I thought Zero K was just ok, but I read it pretty soon after Underworld so I might have just been a little overDeLilloed at that point. He has a new one out now, doesnt he?

it was disappointing imo

last decade? nah

im gonna read the new one anyway. i liked point omega (maybe his most straightforwardly pretentious novel) but zero k not so much, felt very conventional and really just a rehash of earlier stuff that he's rehashed enough at this point (without the elliptical refinement of his more severely minimal stuff post underworld). looking down through his list of novels im less convinced he had a 'classic' period and the ones that really stand out for me ('the names,' 'libra' and 'falling man') are not come before and after much less interesting ones. (i do tend to find his most ambitious stuff fairly tedious. Ratners star is not as clever as it thinks it is and Underworld is infuriating.)

Also there's a review in the most recent LRB of the new one that i haven't read in case spoilers and also bc its by andrew o hagan but it might helpful?

I've only read Great Jones Street. I had two problems with it:

- the main character was a cipher, and since he's also the narrator it left the book bloodless. He has elements of Dylan/Jagger/Lennon as convenient from moment to moment, but I never felt DeLillo actually got into the character.
- like J. G. Ballard, the story was more a scenario being explained than a plot that we see working out. That's perhaps an obvious pitfall when the whole book takes place (as I recall) in one apartment.

I did walk past the actual Great Jones Street in New York, it's about as wide as it is long and only has a handful of buildings on it.