Absalom, Absalom! easily, even though this is a great list. There is such an urgency in the prose—I devoured it in one sitting the first time I read it, which sounds insane because it is a dense and by design exhausting read, but that’s what happened.
― treeship., Wednesday, 27 January 2021 01:16 (three years ago) link
Nightwood is also tremendous. Really quite visionary and insane—some of the descriptions I’ll never forget. This is the woman who is the object of so many others’ obsession:
The perfume that her body exhaled was of the quality of that earth-flesh, fungi, which smells of captured dampness and yet is so dry, overcast with the odour of oil of amber, which is an inner malady of the sea, making her seem as if she had invaded a sleep incautious and entire. Her flesh was the texture of plant life, and beneath it one sensed a frame, broad, porous and sleep-worn, as if sleep were a decay fishing her beneath the visible surface. About her head there was an effulgence as of phosphorous glowing about the circumference of a body of water - as if her life lay through her in ungainly luminous deteriorations - the troubling structure of the born somnambule
― treeship., Wednesday, 27 January 2021 01:22 (three years ago) link
Absalom, Absalom! is one I kept thinking about during the Trump era, b/c Sutpen is such a Trump-like figure - an old man who's emotionally still a teenager, who's built this entire racist empire out of sheer sociopathic entitlement and an obsessive need to avenge his own perceived humiliation at the hands of a Black man.
― Lily Dale, Wednesday, 27 January 2021 03:03 (three years ago) link
That vision of the born somnambule (as if she had invaded a sleep incautious and entire) makes me think of someone I've known most of my life (not myself) bingeing and purging sleep----there's something to it beyond the literary, and that's what literature can deliver, at its best, or one of its best(s?)
― dow, Wednesday, 27 January 2021 03:16 (three years ago) link
Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.
― System, Thursday, 28 January 2021 00:01 (three years ago) link
Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1937
― Daniel_Rf, Thursday, 28 January 2021 17:09 (three years ago) link
Can't believe Death on Credit got no votes! I love the writing in Nightwood though Emily's post makes me want to revisit
― xyzzzz__, Tuesday, 2 February 2021 00:18 (three years ago) link
Missed this somehow. Probably would have went with Locos.
― The Ballad of Mel Cooley (James Redd and the Blecchs), Friday, 5 February 2021 22:51 (three years ago) link